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A ROGUE tattooist who inked 56 stars on a teen girl’s face has caused a write fuss again – after signing his name in giant letters across his girlfriend’s face less than 24 hours after they met. Controversial Rouslan Toumaniantz became notorious when he inscribed a galaxy of stars over the face of Kimberley Vlaeminck, then just 18, in his studio in Coutrai, Belgium. Now Toumaniantz has struck again by tattooing his Christian name in lettering five inches high across another girl’s face. Thanks Jasmine.

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According to the RUV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, FBI agents landed in Reykjavík in August 2011 without prior notification in an attempt to investigate WikiLeaks operations within the country. However, their plan was interupted when Home Secretary Ögmundur Jónasson learned about the FBI’s visit and sent them packing. The Icelandic government then formally protested the FBI’s activities with U.S. authorities.

“Seeing totally unrelated objects perfectly nestle inside of each other provides a certain kind of peace in an otherwise chaotic world.”

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They came up with a title for their novel, The Diamond Club. They also sketched out a rough outline of a plot: When Brianna Young discovers that Roman Dyle, the man she built a relationship and a multimillion dollar company with, has gotten married to another woman behind her back, she embarks on a journey to realize her dreams of professional and sexual revenge for everything she had endured at the hands of Roman.Brianna seeks her romance from The Diamond Club, an exotic gathering of the Bay Area’s most attractive and interesting people, from angel investors and airline pilots to worldfamous chefs and dubstep artists. They singled out three qualities their novel would need to succeed: a cover that looked like 50 shades of grey lots and lots of sex characters with trendy jobs.

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The technology uses a sophisticated peer-to-peer encryption technique that allows users to send encrypted files of up to 60 megabytes through a “Silent Text” app. The sender of the file can set it on a timer so that it will automatically “burn”—deleting it from both devices after a set period of, say, seven minutes. Until now, sending encrypted documents has been frustratingly difficult for anyone who isn’t a sophisticated technology user, requiring knowledge of how to use and install various kinds of specialist software. What Silent Circle has done is to remove these hurdles, essentially democratizing encryption. It’s a game-changer that will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists, dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance or corporate espionage. Governments pushing for more snooping powers, however, will not be pleased.

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Tuesday morning, the 168 remaining employees of DMI in Vaux, a small town near Montluçon in the Department of Allier, smack-dab in the middle of France, rigged about ten gas cylinders throughout the factory they’d been occupying and threatened to blow it up—unless their demands were met. Another day in the decline of the private sector à la Française.

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A nine-year-old Mexican girl has given birth in what authorities have called a rape or sexual abuse case. The baby girl was born on January 27 in Zoquipan Hospital in Jalisco state, weighing 5lbs 7oz. The youngster, who is identified only as Dafne, was eight when she got pregnant by a teenager who has since run away, her mother told local officials.

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Now consider this: Facebook doesn’t just record Web searches. Just because I click on a link offered by Google doesn’t mean I actually read the page that pops up. But with Facebook, the connections go much deeper. Suppose a man in his 50s is accused of being a child predator, and the court requests records from Facebook. They’ll dig up everything: Facebook Pages he Liked, or temporarily Liked; Facebook groups to which he belonged, or used to belong; outside articles visited or shared; his friends and their friends, along with all their activities. While courts can’t convict you for associating with people of questionable character, a jury could certainly be swayed to feel that, if you associate with such people, you may be of that character. And it’s all stored in Facebook’s servers.

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A fresh paint job might be all that’s needed to prevent a giant asteroid from raining destruction upon our planet. Though strange-sounding, the strategy would make use of a real-world phenomenon known as the Yarkovsky effect, named for the Russian engineer who discovered it in 1902. The effect results from the fact that asteroids heat up as they bask in the sun’s light. “The coat of paint would be a very thin, almost like a Saran Wrap layer,” said aerospace engineer David Hyland of Texas A&M, who leads a team that has been studying this method for several years. “If we push it in the right direction, we can get the asteroid to cease crossing Earth’s orbit and completely eliminate the threat.”

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“Please avoid exposing bare fleshy under curves of the buttocks and buttock crack. Bare sides or under curvature of the breasts is also problematic. Please avoid sheer see-through clothing that could possibly expose female breast nipples. Please be sure the genital region is adequately covered so that there is no visible `puffy’ bare skin exposure.”

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In 2013, no one expects to see a man dressed in a Ku Klux Clan robe mid-morning in Center City, Philadelphia. “I think that’s nonsense,” said one woman on the street. “He needs to be committed to the jail system,” said another onlooker. The man, who stood on the corner of 13th and Filbert on Tuesday, is not out to lynch or kill black people. In fact, he is black. Thirty-five-year-old Sixx King says he’s using the offensive symbol to highlight a serious problem: black on black crime. “We’re bringing awareness to the black hypocrisy, complacency and apathy in the African-American community,” said King. According to the FBI, in 2011 more than 7,000 black people were killed. King’s sign reads that the KKK killed 3,446 blacks in 86 years, while black on black murders surpass that number every six months.

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The court confirmed CIA agents tortured and sodomized el-Masri in front of Macedonian state police, and found the Macedonian government complicit in his secret torture by CIA officials. In a case of mistaken identity, Masri was kidnapped in 2004 by the CIA and sent to multiple black sites in Baghdad and Afghanistan for abuse. The CIA figured out they had the wrong man after months of torture, and dumped him on a desolate road in Albania. Masri attempted to sue the CIA over the abuse, but the US courts threw out the case on national security grounds, saying information about the case could never be made public. The German government briefly issued Interpol warrants for the agents involved in Masri’s kidnapping, but dropped this after the State Department threatened “repercussions” from pursuing the case.

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Last year’s drought took a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn’t slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate. Back in 2011, such weeds were already spreading fast. “Monsanto’s ‘Superweeds’ Gallop Through Midwest,” declared the headline of a post I wrote then. What’s the word you use when an already-galloping horse speeds up? Because that’s what’s happening. Let’s try this: “Monsanto’s ‘Superweeds’ Stampede Through Midwest.”

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Three billion years after inanimate chemistry first became animate life, a newly synthesized laboratory compound is behaving in uncannily lifelike ways. The particles aren’t truly alive — but they’re not far off, either. Exposed to light and fed by chemicals, they form crystals that move, break apart and form again. “There is a blurry frontier between active and alive,” said biophysicist Jérémie Palacci of New York University. “That is exactly the kind of question that such works raise.” Palacci and fellow NYU physicist Paul Chaikin led a group of researchers in developing the particles, which are described Jan. 31 in Science as forming “living crystals” in the right chemical conditions.

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DH: I feel like we’re getting off point. So, what is being planned? RB: The DHS will oversee the domestic crackdown that will happen when the perfect storm bears down on us. And the perfect storm is the economy, meaning the U.S. dollar collapse and hyperinflation, racial or class riots sparked by a high-profile incident, and another mass causality event involving guns. Watch for these three things to happen all at once, or in close succession. The polarization caused by these events will be sufficient to cause a second civil war. DH: When? How soon will all of this happen? RB: I don’t have a crystal ball, but I have seen various reports referencing unprecedented “drills” to take place in later March and April. I’ll mention this because I know a lot of people on the inside at DHS have seen this. A document called “Operation Thunderdome.” It’s maybe 50 or 60 pages, I’m not certain. It describes an economic collapse in the U.S., followed by an attack on the government by “a made-up…

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Darien Long aka “Kick Ass Mall Cop” (ATL Security Guard, who tasered “Trashy Mom”) kick out bunch of hoodlums of the mall. This time he got a help by a off duty cop. Darrien became known after the publication of the video “Trashy mom get tasered”, but the following days numerous videos showed Darrian confronting hostile guests, chasing numerous drug dealers from the mall, the local businesses and storefronts in the same area. It’s a job that he has to do on a daily basis, because the area is cluttered with drug dealers, local bullies and other raff’s. Darrien says the area downtown Atlanta needs to be cleaned up so that other business can set up and prosper. This brave guy deserves overwhelming support from the entire nation in his stand against crime and in his stand for order and prosperity.

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We all know that Kim Kardashian is only famous for a sex tape and her family’s exploiting themselves on television as reality whores. Well, we can also add to the list that Kim is a hypocrite, in a different way than you probably imagined. Back in December during the awful Newtown tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Kardashian urged her twitter followers to sign a pledge to help combat gun violence. Yes, that is a good message to send to her many followers. Then this week comes and it seems like its back to the old hypocritical Kardashian that we love to hate on. So what did she do you ask? Well, she tweeted out a picture to her fans of a jewel encrusted handgun this past Saturday. It seems as if Kardashian completely forgot in her teeny tiny pea brain about the pledge she had just signed weeks earlier.

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A pink Hello Kitty bubble gun is the reason a five-year-old girl was suspended from kindergarten at Mount Carmel Area Elementary School. Her family’s attorney says she was at her school bus stop last week when she told a classmate she was going to shoot her and herself with the bubble gun, a gun she did not have with her. People in the community can’t believe it. “It’s just bubbles. It can’t harm anybody. It’s not hard and won’t puncture anything or harm anybody in any way,” Kayla Nash of Shamokin said. According to the family’s lawyer, district officials at Mount Carmel Area Elementary School questioned her for three hours without her parent’s knowledge. She was suspended for 10 days for making terroristic threats.

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I know there’s been a shit ton of articles written on the sorry state of the evil music industry in the last decade. I know, because I have a ton of musician friends and I constantly see the facebook (friend me for magick updates) piss and vinegar. Judging from that, I’d say people’s approval of what the dominant players in the music business have been churning out is probably somewhat lower than that of Congress at the moment i.e. worse than the approval rating for head lice and brussel sprouts. Oh, and it’s always someone else’s fault. But in the midst of all these impassioned debates, there’s always totally obvious “elephant in the room” type shit that no one seems to address, so that’s the entire point to this piece if you couldn’t glean that from the title: stuff I never hear anyone say about the music business in no particular order.

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Sunday police arrested 15-year-old Trevon Isaac after his 59-year-old grandmother called 911 and said Isaac had raped her in her sleep. Court documents state the boy’s grandmother said when she woke up Thursday morning “her privates were hurting and she noticed her panties were missing.” She later found them “under her bed and they had been cut.” The woman told police she ”takes medications at night for medical reason and the medications put her to sleep.” The next night she told police she slept on the couch and the woke up to “Isaac thrusting against her” and that he ran into the bathroom yelling “I just touched you.” The woman later called 911 and her son. Her son picked up Isaac and also called police. The victim’s son said Isaac told him, “I cut her panties off while she was in bed” and “I had sex with grandma.” Court records state he also said that he “had sex with grandma on the couch.”

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Jonah Falcon was stopped and frisked by the TSA at the San Francisco International Airport on July 9 because of a bulging package hidden in his pants. But the 41-year-old New Yorker wasn’t packing a dirty bomb, drugs or a Costco-sized tube of toothpaste. The New Yorker has the world’s largest recorded penis. In an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post, Falcon described his hard times with security guards after his extra carry-on became suspect. “I had my ‘stuff’ strapped to the left. I wasn’t erect at the time,” said Falcon, whose penis is 9 inches flaccid, 13.5 inches erect. “One of the guards asked if my pockets were empty and I said, ‘Yes.'” Falcon said he knew that his interview was about to get a lot more personal when he was led through one of the X-ray body scanners and passed a metal detector. “Another guard stopped me and asked me if I had some sort of growth,” Falcon said, laughing. Indeed he did have a growth.

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The Burger King employee involved in the disturbing picture showing someone standing with shoes on a container of shredded lettuce was fired by the owner of the local franchise, the company said in a statement to Fox8.com. Many details of the picture that was posted on 4chan.org, a social networking website, remain unclear, but the anonymous user reportedly posted the picture along with a comment that said, “This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King.” According to a HyperVocal.com report, an aggravated 4chan user tracked the image’s geo-tagging to locate the employee. The photo was tagged back to Ohio. A Burger King spokeswoman would not confirm the precise location the picture was taken.

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A Brooklyn woman pleaded guilty to her role in a fraud ring that embezzled $57 million from a group that helps compensate victims of Nazi persecution. Zlata Blavatnik, a former clerk for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, faces up to 40 years in prison after admitting to her role in the conspiracy that approved nearly 5,000 fraudulent applications in exchange for kickbacks. The 64-year-old pleaded guilty Tuesday.

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Shying away from certain questions, Calitz, who claimed she was raped by her captors, said more would be revealed in a book they were planning to write about their ordeal. In their almost two years in Mogadishu, Somalia’s largest city, the couple said they were moved – blindfolded – about 17 times. Calitz said she bore no grudges: “They were young enough to be my children, I can’t hate them. They don’t know any different.” Pelizzari said some pirates appeared to be friendly, but they had a rule not to speak to the hostages for more than a minute at a time. “Some were ruthless, but others would sneak us a banana or something now and again,” he said. “I don’t know if it was part of their plan.” The couple said their only link to the world – and a source of entertainment – was the oil-drenched newspaper wrapping their meals. “We’d read whatever news we could find and do the cryptic crosswords in our heads,” he said.

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The fast food chain Chick-fil-A has long been suspected of having an anti-gay agenda, and this week, the company’s COO has decidedly come out on the side of the ‘biblical definition of the family unit.’ Dan Cathy, the president of the multimillion-dollar empire said in an interview with the conservative paper Baptist Press that his company is ‘very much supportive of the family,’ but only when it involves heterosexual couples. ‘Well, guilty as charged,’ Cathy responded when asked about Chick-fil-A’s backing of ‘traditional’ families with a husband and wife.

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Eight months ago, Robert Downs, 51, set up a small structure in the woods near the Tujunga Ponds Wildlife Sanctuary in Sunland, Calif. To hide his home from police, Downs, who was previously homeless, sprayed it with camouflage paint and cut down nearby trees, said Johnie Jones, a deputy in the Parks Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The structure, which Downs built with materials he bought at Home Depot, contained four bunk beds built into the walls, tables, shelves and fire extinguishers. Outside were a rock patio, a barbecue grill and more tables. An American flag was draped over Downs’ bed. Downs stood a chance of evading major legal trouble for his hidden house, but sheriff’s deputies also discovered that he cultivated eight marijuana plants outside the structure, a felony because he did not have a permit to do so, Jones said.

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It first became apparent to my parents that something was wrong when I was four or five months old. I began chewing on my tongue while teething. They took me to a paediatrician where I underwent a series of tests. At first they put a cigarette lighter underneath my foot and waited for my skin to blister. Once they saw that I had no response to that then they began running needles up and down my spine. And since I had no response to either of those tests they came to the conclusion that I had what I have – congenital analgesia. By which point, I had chewed off about a quarter of my tongue through teething.

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The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the State Department and Viral Peace’s creator, tells Danger Room he wants to use “logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them.” Think of it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage.

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Shares in Facebook continued to slide on Tuesday, after an analyst claimed the dominant social network had seen a modest drop in its userbase. Capstone Investment’s Rory Maher said Mark Zuckerberg’s company suffered a 1.1 per cent fall in US users over the last six months. The number of European Facebookers had also declined, he added. Meanwhile, Facebook’s stock hit a month-long low yesterday finishing the day at $28.09 on Nasdaq, after falling some 8 per cent at the start of the week.

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Modern social scientists, who are little more than unscientific socialists, variously view racism as a cancer, a sin, an aberration, and a mental illness rather than a natural and ubiquitous phenomenon. Ignoring the fact that every culture throughout human history has been ethnocentric, they frame racism as an exclusive product of white supremacy, European colonialism, and predatory palefaced capitalism. They also shellac it with a thick gloppy glaze of moralistic condemnation, depicting it as the worst and most destructive of all possible human instincts. The psychological establishment is well on its way to depicting “sociobiological” as personality disorders rather than natural drives toward self-preservation, which in a bygone era were seen as the epitome of mental health.

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However, the error message sounded as if Facebook was analyzing the contents of the message and deciding what was relevant or not, which would go beyond traditional anti-spam measures and veer into censorship territory. “Wow, does Facebook do sentiment analysis on comments and keeps you from posting negative comments?” Scoble asked on his Facebook page. Facebook’s Error Message Scoble’s “This Comment Can’t Be Posted” pop-up message stated the following: “This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.” There was an “Okay” button to close the error message.

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At the time of this report, Facebook “likes” such as “incest” and PTHC (preteen hardcore pornography) were still available in the website’s search engine. One open group with 145 members, “Incest,” offered the following description of the crowd: “all mom dad sister bro aunt f–kers.” A Facebook user by the name “Bizzy Bones” declared: “I masturbated with my cousin once. She was 15. I was 14.” Several visitors to the page liked the listing and one eagerly asked, “How was ur experience?” Another page under the title “Incest” had 1,527 likes. A fourth had 12,311 likes. A fifth had 2,376 likes. Two more had 403 likes. Meanwhile, WND recently reported 34 more links to the FBI depicting images and videos of child sex abuse in a period of only a few days. As part of a two-month undercover news investigation, WND used alias Facebook profiles and located dozens of child-porn images after “friending” many likely pedophiles and predators who trade thousands of pornographic photos

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With that being said, there is a part of me that believes that Lady Gaga isn’t sincere with her antics and is just doing so because she needs a gimmick to separate herself from the rest of the group. With Prince and Madonna, they weren’t acting crazy because they were trying to be different, they were just extravagant figures who have very unique views on many things so they expressed it in their attire and music. I am pretty sure that they probably look back at it now and figure how crazy they were back then, but at least that is who they were. With Lady Gaga I do not get that same type of vibe as I believe she is just putting on a show rather than really expressing herself. She knows that her antics is what sales records and draws in more twitter followers so she does whatever it takes. That does not make her unique, which just makes her a figure seeking attention. In other words, she comes across as fake to me which really takes away from her appeal.

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Human skin takes on the colour of smoked salmon when it is professionally removed in rectangular shapes from a cadaver. A good yield is about 5500 square centimetres. After being mashed up to remove moisture, some is destined to protect burn victims from life-threatening bacterial infections or, once further refined, for breast reconstructions after cancer. The use of human tissue “has really revolutionised what we can do in breast reconstruction surgery”, explains Dr Ron Israeli, a New York plastic surgeon. “Since we started using it in about 2005, it’s really become a standard technique.” A significant number of recovered tissues are transformed into products whose shelf names give little clue to their actual origin. They are used in the dental and beauty industries, for everything from plumping up lips to smoothing out wrinkles.

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The security of high-end handcuffs depends on a detainee not having access to certain small, precisely-shaped objects. In the age of easy 3D printing and other DIY innovations, that assumption may no longer apply. In a workshop Friday at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, a German hacker and security consultant who goes by the name “Ray” demonstrated a looming problem for handcuff makers hoping to restrict the distribution of the keys that open their cuffs: With plastic copies he cheaply produced with a laser-cutter and a 3D printer, he was able to open handcuffs built by the German firm Bonowi and the English manufacturer Chubb, both of which attempt to control the distribution of their keys to keep them exclusively in the hands of authorized buyers such as law enforcement.

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The mysterious disc-shaped object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea could be a relic from a giant World War II device placed there by the Nazis to disrupt Soviet submarine navigation. ­The object may be the concrete anchor of the device, which also had to be fitted with stainless steel mesh, Swedish naval officer and warfare history expert Anders Autellus told Swedish newspaper Expressen. It would interfere with submarine radar signals and make them crash. The mesh itself may well have eroded away over the decades, but the images of the object made by the Ocean X team exploring it show what appear to be holes, where it was attached to the foundation, he added.

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In the foreclosure-battered inland stretches of California, local government officials desperate for change are weighing a controversial but inventive way to fix troubled mortgages: Condemn them. Officials from San Bernardino County and two of its cities have formed a local agency to consider the plan. But investors who stand to lose money on their mortgage investments have been quick to register their displeasure.

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It’s relevant to understand that these children have inherited extra genes—that of TWO women and one man—and will be able to pass this extra set of genetic traits to their own offspring. One of the most shocking considerations here is that this was done—repeatedly—even though no one knows what the ramifications of having the genetic traits of three parents might be for the individual, or for their subsequent offspring. Based on what I’ve learned about the genetic engineering of plants, I’m inclined to say the ramifications could potentially be vast, dire, and completely unexpected. As a general, broad-strokes rule, it seems few scientists fond of gene-tinkering have a well-rounded or holistic view of living organisms, opting instead to view the human body as a machine. And as demonstrated with the multi-varied problems that have arisen from genetically engineered foods—from the development of superweeds and superpests, to the creation of a never-before-seen organism

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☛ Many Wall Street executives say wrongdoing is necessary: survey

A quarter of Wall Street executives see wrongdoing as a key to success, according to a survey by whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow released on Tuesday. In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.

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On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5” on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them. As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead. They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he’s wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.

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NSA whistleblower Thomas A. Drake is backing the EFF’s lawsuit over the government’s massive spying program. Drake also had a lot to say about the establishment of a ‘surveillance society’ in America. In a video interview, he said it was ‘soft tyranny. It raises the specter of you’re automatically suspicious until we prove that you’re not. It raises the specter of a universal wiretap, a persistent universal wiretap on every single person, or if not, they can create one.’

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Trolled!

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Currently, large doses of chemotherapy are required when treating certain forms of cancer, resulting in toxic side effects. The chemicals enter the body and work to destroy or shrink the tumor, but also harm vital organs and drastically affect bodily functions. Now, University of Missouri scientists have found a more efficient way of targeting prostate tumors by using gold nanoparticles and a compound found in tea leaves. This new treatment would require doses that are thousands of times smaller than chemotherapy and do not travel through the body inflicting damage to healthy areas. The study is being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Lake County, Florida sheriff’s deputies who failed to identify themselves when knocking on a man’s door at 1:30AM at night immediately shot and killed the homeowner after he allegedly opened his door with a gun in hand. The man who was murdered, 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott, was described by neighbors as a good person and “very nice guy.” The deputies realized later they got the wrong house, but for good measure they searched the man’s apartment and found drugs, which apparently justifies their murdering him randomly. The police are entirely unapologetic. Lt. John Herrell said of the incident, “The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff or police office, you’re going to get shot.” For police who refuse to identify themselves to point their guns at you is A-OK, yet for you to do the same in self-defense is grounds for summary execution.

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What makes this new legislation shocking is that we have seen the US government repeatedly use the “State Secrets” and the “National InSecurity card to suspend the Constitution at will to commit a wide variety of heinous activities from torture and indefinite detention without trial to outright forced drugging of prisoners and even repeated assassination by the government, of people including US citizens, which is now being done on the direction of the United States’ first even assassination czar. Keeping that in mind the fact that lawmakers are now trying to go after reporters that “publish government secrets” unequivocally amounts to an outright ban of any and all reporting on government corruption PERIOD because at the end of the day the corrupt and illegal activities conducted by government officials are done in secret in the first place.

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Five years ago a composer created music for use in a one-off anti-piracy video. However, without his permission it was used time and again on dozens of commercial DVDs such as Harry Potter. Even in the wake of a huge controversy over “corrupt” and “mafia-like” practices, the local music rights group that got involved in the case failed to pay him the money he was owed. The case went to court and this week the music rights group lost.

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Most girls as young as 6 are already beginning to think of themselves as sex objects, according to a new study of elementary school-age kids in the Midwest. Researchers have shown in the past that women and teens think of themselves in sexually objectified terms, but the new study is the first to identify self-sexualization in young girls. The study, published online July 6 in the journal Sex Roles, also identified factors that protect girls from objectifying themselves.

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Two Harvard engineers are planning to spray thousands of tonnes of sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The field experiment in solar geoengineering aims to ultimately create a technology to replicate the observed effects of volcanoes that spew sulphates into the stratosphere, using sulphate aerosols to bounce sunlight back to space and decrease the temperature of the Earth. David Keith, one of the investigators, has argued that solar geoengineering could be an inexpensive method to slow down global warming, but other scientists warn that it could have unpredictable, disastrous consequences for the Earth’s weather systems and food supplies. Environmental groups fear that the push to make geoengineering a “plan B” for climate change will undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

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“What really frightens me is not just the disastrous nature of Citizens United, but the whole trend that we are seeing lately, economically, of moving this country toward an oligarchic form of government,” he said. “What you have right now is incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income… the Walton family of Walmart itself owns more wealth — one family — than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.” “You’ve got that reality out there, and then what’s happening now — what Citizens United is about — is these guys are not content to own the economy, to own the wealth of America, they now want to own lock, stock and barrel the political process as well.” The DISCLOSE Act would have required outside campaign groups to disclose those who contribute $10,000 or more. But it failed to move forward on Tuesday after Senate Republicans unanimously voted against it.

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More than 40 poles have been bent, buckled or broken in the past 18 months in one area of south Auckland, New Zealand, it is claimed. The signs, bearing legally required notices such as parking restrictions, are thought to have cost ratepayers thousands of dollars to replace. “Prostitutes use these street sign poles as dancing poles,” said Donna Lee, an elected member of the city council’s Otara-Papatoetoe Local Board. “The poles are part of their soliciting equipment and they often snap them. “Some of the prostitutes are big, strong people.”

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People left the “massive house party” and went about two miles to the Walmart, where more shots were fired about 11:20 p.m., according to a second police report. Men and women, most appearing to be teens on the YouTube video, threw produce around as they crowded into the store. The three-minute video shows people riding shopping carts and mugging for the camera in what apparently lasted several minutes. Gee said snacks and sodas were stolen, but no one was hurt and damage was minimal. A store security scanner also was damaged as everybody fled, the police report said. No identifiable Walmart employees are seen during the video. The gunshots were fired into the air outside the store, but no cars or people were hit, the report said. Flash mobs are usually a group of people who dance or sing together in a public place, captured on social media. But so-called “flash robs” like this one are a recent phenomena.

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A horrifying video of a woman being pounced upon by roughly twenty men after she left a bar in India has caused international outrage. In it, the woman is seemingly stripped, molested, and even burned with cigarettes as she screams for help for roughly thirty minutes, to no avail. Thanks Jasmine

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☛ Cannibal cult arrests in Papua New Guinea

Police in remote Papua New Guinea have arrested members of an alleged cannibal cult accused of killing at least seven people, eating their brains raw and making soup from their penises, a report said Friday. The 29 people were part of a 1,000-strong group formed to combat errant sorcerers who The National newspaper said had begun charging exorbitant fees. The cost of a witch doctor revealing a cause of death or casting out an evil spirit was usually 1000 kina ($472) cash, plus a pig and a bag of rice, but some were also demanding sex as payment. “It’s against our traditional ethics and morals for a sorcerer to have intercourse with a man’s wife or teenage daughter,” said one local cult leader in the Tangi area, inland from Madang province on PNG’s northeast coast.

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“I make a point of staying right at the edge of poverty. I don’t have a pair of pants without a hole in them, and the only pair of boots I have are on my feet. I don’t mess around with unnecessary stuff, so I don’t need much money. I believe it’s meant to be that way. There’s a ‘struggle’ you have to go through, and if you make a lot of money it doesn’t make the ‘struggle’ go away. It just makes it more complicated. If you keep poor, the struggle is simple. “ ~Von Dutch

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They are surely the most horrifying offshoot of modern technology – nuclear warheads which can smite hundreds of thousands of people dead within seconds, and leave lasting scars on a landscape for generations. And while most of us will have seen archive footage of nuclear explosions before, one thing we are unlikely to have heard is their sound. For, according to one expert, most films we see of a nuclear blast use stock ‘explosion’ sound effects for the bang – and audio footage is few and far between. But Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics, has shared a unigue video of a blast during America’s testing of nukes in the Yucca Mountain area of Nevada during the 1950s.

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No longer is it enough for Washington to simply use, cooperate with, or listen to private communications. Now the president claims the authority to order all of it seized– as in nationalized under federal control. In a sense, however, this sweeping new order is only somewhat unprecedented, at least in the Bush-Obama era of executive power. Potential seizure of communications infrastructure simply folds into a laundry list of resources that Obama declared authority to seize and manage in another recent Executive Order:

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Police in Papua New Guinea have unearthed a ‘cannibal cult’ in the jungle thought to be responsible for the murders of seven suspected witch doctors. The 29 cult members allegedly ate their victims’ brains raw and made soup from their penises, according to police officials. Madang Police Commander Anthony Wagambie said: “They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong; they admit what they’ve done openly.” Wagambie said the suspected killers believed their victims practiced “sanguma”, or sorcery, and had allegedly been extorting money and demanding sex from poverty-stricken villagers for supernatural services. The cult members are thought to have eaten the witch doctors’ organs in the belief that they would attain supernatural powers and become ‘bulletproof’.

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Dr. Twana Sparks, an ENT (Ears, Nose and Throat) surgeon, had just finished doing a tympanoplasty with mastoidectomy, a surgical procedure to correct a middle ear problem. The patient was a middle-thirties Hispanic man who lay stretched out before her on the operating table, still under anesthesia. After applying a dressing to the surgical site, Dr. Sparks, who was also the hospital chief of staff, reached inside the patient’s boxer shorts without wearing gloves, fished out his penis and pointed it at the ceiling. She observed fluid filled vesicles on the side of the shaft, indicating a sexually transmitted disease, and shouted “Oh Gross!” She then slapped the head of his penis three times, saying “Bad boy, bad boy, bad boy!” with each strike, as her all female operating team erupted in laughter.

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In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated widespread incidents of power thefts in Puerto Rico believed to be related to smart meter deployment. The FBI believed that former employees of the meter manufacturer and employees of the utility company were tampering with the meters charging between $300 to $1,000 to reprogram residential meters and $3,000 to reprogram commercial meters. The perpetrators were said to have hacked into the smart meters using an optical converter device connected to a laptop, allowing smart meters to connect with the computer. The hackers were able to change the settings for recording power consumptions using software available on the internet after making a connection. This method does not require the removal, alteration or disassembly of the meter.

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No music fan in his or her right mind would pull the plug on the legendary Bruce Springsteen and Sir Paul McCartney, but that’s exactly what London police did late Saturday night. Springsteen was at the tail end of a three-hour long performance in London’s Hyde Park when he brought the ex-Beatle onto the stage to do a couple of songs together. The pair went beyond the park’s 10:30 p.m. curfew by about half an hour, prompting police to cut off the juice.

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Jacqueline established The Snuggery because she believes in the healing power of touch. The Snuggery is a place to take a break from the hustle and bustle of life and focus on the simple restorative pleasure of touch. Though science has unquestionably supported the psychological and physical benefits of non-sexual touch, Americans distinctly lack it. It’s time for change. At The Snuggery, Jacqueline provides individuals with private snuggling sessions. She aims to make the world a gentler place, one snuggle at a time.

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16 escape stories with only one that makes sense The blind Chinese dissident, Chen Guangcheng has finally “escaped” the “brutal” treatment of the Chinese “regime” and landed in the “free” world. The world – in particular the American media – called this a human rights win for America.

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Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.

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Beaver and two other friends buy shirts with monsters on the front, each more gruesome than the next. Beaver is the only one who tricks his parents and wears his new sweatshirt to school. However, the principal doesn’t like it and an angry Ward comes to pick up Beaver.

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Shuffling along the road, holding tightly onto her grandmother’s hand, every step three-year-old Yu Yu takes is painful. The toddler suffers from an undiagnosed condition which causes her feet to grow at an alarmingly rapid rate. The youngster is forced to walk barefoot as her poverty-stricken family are unable to afford shoes big enough for her. Yu Yu’s feet are constantly swollen and heavy, making moving around extremely difficult.

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Commonly used baby soaps and shampoos, including products from Johnson & Johnson, Aveeno and CVS, can trigger a positive result on newborns’ marijuana screening tests, according to a recent study. A minute amount of the cleansing products in a urine sample — just 0.1 milliliters or less — was found to cause a positive result.

The military entertainment complex is an old phenomenon that binds Hollywood with the US military. Known as militainment, it serves both parties well. Filmmakers get access to high tech weaponry – helicopters, jet planes and air craft carriers while the Pentagon gets free and positive publicity. The latest offering to come from this relationship is Act of Valor and it takes the collaboration one step further. The producers get more than just equipment — they have cast active-duty military personnel in the lead roles, prompting critics to say the lines have become so blurred that it is hard to see where Hollywood ends and Pentagon propaganda begins. In this week’s feature, the Listening Post’s Nic Muirhead looks at the ties between the US military and Hollywood.

Evansville, Indiana police intent on “sending a message” that online threats against police will not be tolerated organized a massive raid against a forum troll on an online forum. The police decided to bring a TV crew to film their raid against their critic, they also brought a SWAT team. Rather than knock on the accused’s front door, which was wide open, the police instead threw two flash-bang stun grenades through their front window and storm door. Unfortunately, rather than finding the home occupied by a gun-toting cop killer, they found an entirely innocent grandmother and 18-year-old girl, who were both shocked and confused.

Small police departments across America are collecting battlefield-grade arsenals thanks to a program that allows them to get their hands on military surplus equipment – amphibious tanks, night-vision goggles, and even barber chairs or underwear – at virtually no cost, except for shipment and maintenance. Over the last five years, the top 10 beneficiaries of this “Department of Defense Excess Property Program” included small agencies such as the Fairmount Police Department. It serves 7,000 people in northern Georgia and received 17,145 items from the military. The cops in Issaquah, Washington, a town of 30,000 people, acquired more than 37,000 items

That new capability will drive the demand for even more raw data. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency, overseen by the U.S. director of national intelligence, has launched two projects that may help analysts use civilian video from YouTube, Vimeo and other sources. Investigators at the Finder program are studying ways to locate where and when a video was taken based solely on the image itself. That’s hard enough. But researchers at IARPA’s Aladdin are working on an even more challenging task: how to search for “specific events of interest.” If they succeed, analysts could feed in a name, a simple text description or a few sample videos of what they seek—say, “five people wearing backpacks next to a pickup truck”—and get back any number of clips that match the query.

To stop the ‘hate speech’ anarchy, Twitter is considering starting off by blocking the very possibility of replies from so-called ‘non-authoritative’ users, marked out by the absence of a profile picture, followers or bio information, as FT.com reports. This is the first step, but there might be more to come. However, the company’s management is concerned that by installing any kinds of ‘selective’ measures, they may put an end to the unique Twitter-style ‘freedom of tweets’ that has helped Arab revolutions. Anonymity was the key factor that allowed so many users there to join and have their say. “The reason we want to allow pseudonyms is there are lots of places in the world where it’s the only way you’d be able to speak freely,” FT quotes Dick Costolo as saying. Twitter is basically the ‘last harbor’ of anonymity, as it does not have to be linked with such powerful database platforms as Facebook and Google. Silencing trolls may hit those ‘revolutionary’ users as well.

“Well, were you having sex? What are you doing here?” The girl quickly responded “no, no, no, officer no,” the affidavit said. The girl told police she and her friend were just talking. But the man told the girl he “needed to check.” The girl asked “Check what?” “I need to see inside,” he responded. That’s when he ordered her to take off her pants and underwear so he could look for bruising or other evidence of sexual activity. In fear, the affidavit said, she complied. The girl told police she thought it “was the right thing to do” because he was an officer. Her 19-year-friend turned away, unable to watch, according to the affidavit. He told police he heard the man tell the girl “I need you to spread your legs wider so I can see.” The officer then used a flashlight to “inspect” her and told her to pull down her blouse so he could check for bruising, according to the police report. Then he returned the driver’s license to the boy and told them “Go home.”

Two north Florida “animals” are facing child porn charges after photos showing them raping a 4-year-old girl were found on a cell phone they left at a Walmart. Pictures on the phone showed convicted sex offender Alan Johnson, 33, and his girlfriend, Jennifer Sparks, 37, abusing the girl “in every way imaginable,” Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott told WSOC-TV. “My most seasoned detectives here said that its the worst they’ve ever seen,” he said. A shopper found the phone in a shopping cart at a Cape Coral Walmart on June 2 and turned it in, police said.

On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second.

A local couple who claim to be Satanists believe they’re a victim of a hate crime and were targeted because of their religious beliefs. Someone cut down a political poster stating, “VOTE SATAN” from their front porch where they live in Mountain View, a suburb of Denver. “We are Satanists… Satanists,” said Luigi Bellaviste. Luigi and Angie Bellaviste belong to the Church of Satan. They even have a Satanic Bible in their home. Thanks Jasmine

Increasingly, smartphones are creating problems in the backcountry, particularly in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where, officials say, more hikers are skipping basic gear — particularly a map, compass, and flashlight – and relying too heavily on phones with GPS and a slew of gear-like apps, including compasses and trail maps, to bail them out of a jam. “Being prepared for a hike does not mean having your cellphone charged,” said Major Kevin Jordan from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, which oversees 150 to 180 rescues each year. “To find people with a map and compass is just incredibly rare. It boggles my mind. But when we rescue someone, I hear a lot of regret, a lot of people saying, ‘I should have brought more than my phone, but everywhere I go at home I have cellphone coverage.’ ”

Drug agents removed more than 41,000 marijuana plants from a 40-acre area near Warner Springs in northeastern San Diego County, Drug Enforcement Administration officials announced Monday. The haul, conducted Sunday and Monday, was the largest marijuana seizure on private property in the county’s history, DEA officials said. No arrests were made, but the investigation is continuing, officials said. The removal, from a remote, secluded area called Sunshine Summit, required 35 DEA agents and officers from the multi-agency Narcotics Task Force. Also found on the property were two large water tanks, chemicals for fertilizer, and a 30-round magazine for a semiautomatic weapon. The marijuana removed from the site was estimated to have a wholesale value of $41 million.

✪ Deputy who tried to smuggle drug-stuffed burrito gets 2 years

A former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy accused of trying to smuggle a burrito stuffed with heroin into a courthouse lockup was sentenced Monday to two years in jail. Henry Marin, who was once portrayed as a dim-witted bumbler on a reality television show that focused on sheriff’s recruits, said nothing as a courtroom deputy handcuffed him and led him away to the type of cell he was once responsible for guarding.

The ‘GM babies’ were born into women who had trouble conceiving their own children. In order to ‘birth’ the babies, extra genes from a female donor were inserted into the women’s eggs before they were fertilized. After conception, scientists fingerprinted 2 of the one-year-old children and confirmed that they inherited DNA from 3 adults — one man and 2 women. What this means is that due to inheriting these extra genes through the genetic modification process, they will now be able to pass them along to their offspring. In other words, these genetically modified babies — if allowed to mate with non-GM humans — could potentially alter the very genetic coding of generations to come. Genetecists state that this genetic modification method may one day be used to create babies “with extra, desired characteristics such as strength or high intelligence.”

Inmates in a Brazilian prison can shave time off their sentences by becoming living sources of green energy. All they need to do is turn the wheel of a bike connected to a power generator. For every 16 hours of pedaling the inmates of the Santa Rita do Sapucaí prison have their sentences reduced by one day, according to a Jornal Nacional report. The generators the prisoners put in motion charge batteries, which are taken to the city center to power some of the street lights. The two bikes installed in the prison are enough to light six bulbs. The reason behind the offer is not to profit from free labor however. Rather it is meant to give inmates an incentive to keep themselves in good shape, says city judge José Henrique Mallmann, who introduced the idea. Thanks Bjarni

Colombia has decriminalized cocaine and marijuana, saying that people cannot be jailed for possessing the drugs for personal use. Anyone caught with less 20 grams (0.705 ounces) of marijuana or one gram (0.035 ounces) of cocaine for personal use will not be prosecuted or detained, but could be required to receive physical or psychological treatment, depending on their level of intoxication, according to Colombia Reports. Colombian Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon said law enforcement would continue its fight against drug trafficking, but would not make further comment.

Do you know how your tax dollars are spent? US radio host Dennis Bernstein and investigative reporter Dave Lindorff illustrate just how much US tax money goes towards the country’s war chest. “People have to realise that 53 cents of every dollar that they are paying into taxes is going to the military to an astonishing figure there is an enormous, enormous amount of money being blown on war an killing and destruction.”

Sixty million euro has been stolen from bank accounts in a massive cyber bank raid after fraudsters raided dozens of financial institutions around the world. According to a joint report by software security firm McAfee and Guardian Analytics, more than 60 firms have suffered from what it has called an “insider level of understanding”. “The fraudsters’ objective in these attacks is to siphon large amounts from high balance accounts, hence the name chosen for this research – Operation High Roller,” the report said. “If all of the attempted fraud campaigns were as successful as the Netherlands example we describe in this report, the total attempted fraud could be as high as 2bn euro (£1.6bn).” The automated malicious software programme was discovered to use servers to process thousands of attempted thefts from both commercial firms and private individuals. The stolen money was then sent to so-called mule accounts in caches of a few hundreds and 100,000 euro (£80,000) at a time.

Nearly every day, and often several times a day, there is fresh news of privacy invasions as companies hone their ability to imperceptibly assemble a vast amount of data about anyone with a smartphone, laptop or credit card. Retailers, search engines, social media sites, news organizations — all want to know as much as they can about their visitors and users so that ads can be targeted as precisely as possible. But data mining, which has become central to the corporate bottom line, can be downright creepy, with companies knowing what you search for, what you buy, which websites you visit, how long you browse — and more. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Target realized a teenage customer was pregnant before her father knew; the firm identifies first-term pregnancies through, among other things, purchases of scent-free products. It’s akin to someone rifling through your wallet, closet or medicine cabinet, but in the digital sphere no one picks your pocket or breaks into your house

As location tracking by cell phone companies becomes increasingly accurate and widespread, the question of who your location data actually belongs to remains unresolved. Privacy activists in the U.S. say the law has not kept pace with developing technology and argue for more stringent privacy standards for cell phone companies. As Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania professor put it, “all of the rules are in a state of enormous uncertainty and flux.” The Obama administration has maintained that mobile phone users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy.” The administration has argued against more stringent standards for police and the FBI to obtain location data.

After being challenged by his lab, the DHS dared Humphreys’ crew to hack into a drone and take command. Much to their chagrin, they did exactly that. Humphrey tells Fox News that for a few hundreds dollar his team was able to “spoof” the GPS system on board the drone, a technique that involves mimicking the actual signals sent to the global positioning device and then eventually tricking the target into following a new set of commands. And, for just $1,000, Humphreys says the spoofer his team assembled was the most advanced one ever built. “Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys tells Fox. The real danger here, however, is that the government is currently considering plans that will allow local law enforcement agencies and other organizations from coast-to-coast to control drones of their own in America’s airspace.

At a hearing yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee took up the issue of online tracking, the browser-based Do Not Track flag, and, in an unlikely turn of events, cybersecurity. The hearing included testimony from Ohio State University Law School’s Prof. Peter Swire, Mozilla’s Alex Fowler, the Association of National Advertisers’ Bob Liodice, and TechFreedom’s Berin Szoka. While there were a number of heated moments in the hearing, the most surprising was the advertising industry’s claim that respecting consumer choice will harm “cybersecurity.” This new argument from the advertising industry only raises more concerns for the civil liberties implications of online tracking and was, as Rockefeller aptly noted, little more than a “red herring.”

EFF has pressed for legislation to prevent digital book retailers from handing over information about individuals’ reading habits as evidence to law enforcement agencies without a court’s approval. Earlier this year, California instituted the “reader privacy act,” which makes it more difficult for law-enforcement groups to gain access to consumers’ digital reading records. Under the new law, agencies must get a court order before they can require digital booksellers to turn over information revealing which books their customers have browsed, purchased, read and underlined. The American Civil Liberties Union and EFF, which partnered with Google and other organizations to push for the legislation, are now seeking to enact similar laws in other states. Bruce Schneier, a cyber-security expert and author, worries that readers may steer clear of digital books on sensitive subjects such as health, sexuality and security—including his own works—out of fear that their reading is being tracked

✪ What is causing the outbreak of Flesh Eating Diseases?

However, some people have surmised that the use of antibiotics in our food supply is the main culprit while the overuse of antibiotics by doctors further exasperates the problem. In the 1940’s farmers began treating their livestock with antibiotics. It was soon discovered that if you fed antibiotics to your chickens, pigs and cows on a regular basis that the animals would get fatter quicker and with less feed. In order to compete with the other factory farms farmers started feeding their animals antibiotics everyday! And as we all know by now, the more antibiotics one takes whether through a prescription or through eating antibiotic laden meat, the more resistant one gets. As a side note I also wonder if eating all this antibiotic laden meat has contributed to the obesity epidemic in America..I mean if large doses of antibiotics cause animals to get fat while eating less, wouldn’t that do the same in humans?

Asian eyes are traditionally thinner and narrower than Caucasian or African-American eyes, which tend to be rounder and wider. Asian eyes tend to resemble the oval shape of almonds, although some can look even narrower than that. Most Asians have only a single eyelid (meaning their eyelids don’t have a prominent crease). You can make your eyes look Asian by using makeup or undergoing plastic surgery.

There are many reasons why you might want to look Asian: maybe you’re playing an Asian person in a school play, maybe you’re going to an anime convention and want to look like a certain character, maybe you’re dressing up for a costume party or for Halloween, or maybe you just want to change your appearance for fun, or to disguise your appearance to evade the law. In any case, this article will allow you to (sort of) go from looking White to looking Asian, without much fuss or money needed.

As the sprawling surveillance site being constructed by the National Security Agency (NSA) in Utah grows larger and nearer completion every day, the domestic spy service remains tightlipped about just how much and what kind of personal electronic data they have already collected and collated. Not only does the NSA refuse to provide such information, it insists that it cannot be forced to.

John and Jessie Bates and their 7-year-old son, Tyler, began experiencing mysterious health problems months after after moving into a new home in Suquamish, Washington in March 2007. Tyler was having trouble breathing, Jessie developed a bizarre rash, and John was “perpetually sick,” according to My Fox Phoenix. Though a standard inspection found no problems, the family suspected the house itself was the culprit. A year and a half later, a neighbor revealed the home’s sordid secret: the previous occupant had used it as a meth lab. Even more certain that the building was behind their ailments, the Bates began ripping up the floors and walls. They found “iodine-like staining on the walls and human feces under the floor,” Jessie told Fox News.

Madrid’s own Spok, Neko and Rosh bombed Gran Via, the main street of “Mad City” using an innovative technique which consists of cutting vinyl from a massive block-long advertisement and then peeling off their letters. This new subtractive method makes a permanent mark on the street with minimum effort. Quick, smooth and real nice work from these three amigos.

After inviting students to submit personal stories of the abuse of prescription drugs for academic advantage, The Times received almost 200 submissions. While a majority focused on the prevalence of these drugs on college campuses, many wrote about their increasing appearance in high schools, the focus of our article on Sunday. We have highlighted about 30 of the submissions below, almost all written by current high school students or recent graduates. In often vivid detail — snorting their own pills, stealing pills from friends — the students described an issue that they found upsetting, valuable, dangerous and, above all else, real. Most of them claimed that it was a problem rooted not in drugs per se, but with the pressure that compelled some youngsters to use them.

Theft is followed closely by sex crimes and child pornography charges, with 14 such incidents listed in Blackburn’s report. Six TSA employees were charged with possession of child pornography; one of them got caught because he “uploaded explicit pictures of young girls to an Internet site on which he also posted a photograph of himself in his TSA uniform,” the report notes. Eight others were charged variously with child molestation, rape (including child rape), and even running a prostitution ring. It’s not hard to figure out why persons possessing such proclivities would seek jobs where they would be able to ogle and grope other people’s private parts with impunity.

About those “extended overdraft” fees: consumer advocates have noted that they are not unlike shady payday loans that charge consumers a tremendous amount of interest to get some needed cash in the short term. The Consumer Federation of America recently compared the two practices, and came up with some disturbing findings: As it has before, the Consumer Federation reported the cost at each bank of a $100 overdraft repaid two weeks later as if it were a short-term loan. It said the best deal, at Citibank, was equivalent to a loan with an annual percentage rate of 884 percent. Some banks, including PNC and RBS Citizens, charge more than 2,000 percent. Another thing: the banks examined in the Pew report have continued to reserve the right to process withdrawals by dollar amount, rather than chronologically. This practice “maximizes the number of times an account goes negative, thus increasing overdraft fees” – and the banks can choose to reorder transactions whenever they want

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occupied not by stars and planets but substances that could become useful in everyday life – has concluded that scientists have synthesized barely one tenth of 1 percent of the potential medicines that could be made. The report, in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience, estimates that the actual number of these so-called “small molecules” could be 1 novemdecillion (that’s 1 with 60 zeroes), 1 million billion billion billion billion billion billion, which is more than some estimates of the number of stars in the universe.

Those of us who have been through a few media cycles of hysteria over the “latest drug menace” are always skeptical when the mainstream whips itself up into a fine frenzy over the newest chemical bug-a-boo threatening the citizenry. But even a stuck clock is right twice a day, and it appears that there’s some substance behind the negative publicity surrounding “bath salts,” which in no small part due to sensationalist press coverage, have become the latest quasi-legal drug craze to sweep the nation.

But as mapping images become sharper and more detailed, critics are warning of privacy risks. Nick Pickles, director of the civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch, perceives the new mapping technology as an intrusive practice that will lead to a surveillance society which delivers Internet browsers all the tools to spy on people in their own backyards. “The next generation of maps is taking us over the garden fence,” he asserted. “You won’t be able to sunbathe in your garden without worrying about an Apple or Google plane buzzing overhead taking pictures.” Consequently, Pickles suggests that mapping companies should ask for permission before they publish images of people’s homes online.

The results obtained for the total release of Xe-133 was 15.3 EBq (uncertainty range 12.2-18.3, EBq – 1018 Bq), more than 2 x total release from Chernobyl (Chernobyl total was 5.2 EBq) and “likely the largest radioactive noble gas release in history”. This took place between 11 and 15 March 2011. In fact, the release is greater than the entire estimated Xe-133 inventory of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, and is explained by the decay of I-133 (half-life 20.8h) into Xe-133. There is strong evidence that Xe-133 release started before the first active venting was made, possibly from structural damage to reactor components and/or leaks due to excessive pressure inside the reactor.

✦ Mob sexually assaults women at Egypt anti-sex assault rally

Friday’s march was called to demand an end to sexual assaults. Around 50 women participated, surrounded by a larger group of male supporters who joined to hands to form a protective ring around them. The protesters carried posters saying, “The people want to cut the hand of the sexual harasser,” and chanted, “The Egyptian girl says it loudly, harassment is barbaric.” After the marchers entered a crowded corner of the square, a group of men waded into the women, heckling them and groping them. The male supporters tried to fend them off, and it turned into a melee involving a mob of hundreds. The marchers tried to flee while the attackers chased them and male supporters tried to protect them. But the attackers persisted, cornering several women against a metal sidewalk railing, including an Associated Press reporter, shoving their hands down their clothes and trying to grab their bags. The male supporters fought back, swinging belts and fists and throwing water.

Lawmakers are working to block an unprecedented power grab by the Environmental Protection Agency to use the Clean Water Act (CWA) and control land alongside ditches, gullies and other ephemeral spots by claiming the sources are part of navigable waterways. These temporary water sources are often created by rain or snowmelt, and would make it harder for private property owners to build in their own backyards, grow crops, raise livestock and conduct other activities on their own land, lawmakers say. “Never in the history of the CWA has federal regulation defined ditches and other upland features as ‘waters of the United States,’” said Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), the ranking committee member, and Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio), chairman of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.

With a mohawk-style plume of hair and pink flesh covered in leopard-esque spots, the mysterious animal terrified locals in Xinxiang, Henan province Xinxiang is close to several scientific research centres and a local medical school – and locals became convinced the creature was an experiment gone wrong, on the run from a nearby lab. One witness said: ‘The pink skin makes it look just like pig gone wrong in some sort of genetic experiment.’

The 33-year-old, from Arizona, first made news headlines last year, when stories of her goal of reaching 1,600lbs appeared on the Internet and in various tabloids. Everyone was shocked that someone would actually want to become the world’s fattest person, and spend a small fortune in the process. Back then, Susanne revealed that she and her two boys, Gabriel, 16, and Brendin, 12, visit the supermarket and spend about eight hours filling six shopping carts with all kinds of foods. In order to reach the 800lbs-mark she had set for the end of 2011, the overweight single mom guzzled down about 20,000 calories a day. She didn’t reach her goal, but now the dedicated weight-gainer is getting married, and upped her daily intake to 30,000 calories, in order to become the world’s biggest bride.

The report is sure to reignite a long-simmering debate over public health and religious liberties: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Thursday that 11 baby boys in New York City were infected with herpes between Nov. 2000 and Dec. 2011 following an ultra-Orthodox Jewish circumcision ritual called metzitzah b’peh — or oral suction — in which the mohel puts his mouth directly on the newborn’s circumcised penis and sucks away the blood.

“He dug into a bag and popped one in his mouth. As soon as it hit his mouth somebody tells him, ‘You just ate moose shit’ and the whole group of people started laughing at him,” said Eyolfson. She said it was a parent chaperone that offered her son the so-called almonds from a sandwich baggie. But the principal of the school, a resource officer and her son’s teacher all watched it happen, Eyolfson said.

“A young man in town recalled that Mr. Romney confronted him as he smoked marijuana and drank on the beach last summer, demanding that he stop. The issue appears to be a recurring nuisance for the Romneys. Mr. Quint, who lives on the waterfront near Mr. Romney, said that a police officer had asked him, on a weekend when the candidate was in town, to report any pot smoking on the beach. The officer explained to him that “your neighbors have complained,” Mr. Quint recalled. “He was pretty clear that it was the Romneys.”

“Whenever somebody makes a score, he puts the word out and all the drugs are bought up,” the prisoner tells us. The preferred form of currency is books of stamps, which are valued at $6 each. “When the weed, heroin or oxys hit the yard, dudes have their stamps ready,” he continues. “It’s a first-come, first-serve basis, but you better have your cash in hand if you’re looking to cop.” Prison dealers always want payment up front. Marijuana, heroin and Oxycontin are the most popular substances overall, and supply generally meets demand. “I got busted for oxys and I can still get them in here,” the prisoner reflects. “The sad thing about it all is, they lock you up for drugs and they can’t even keep the drugs out of the prison.”

David Bronner, the CEO of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, was arrested today after engaging in an act of peaceful civil disobedience outside the White House to protest the federal ban on industrial hemp farming. Bronner locked himself in a steel cage with several hemp plants which he began harvesting and pressing for oil. Firefighters eventually cut open the lock and police then arrested Bronner.

STOMPer Minzy was disturbed by an online video which shows how this super-fresh frog sashimi was actually prepared in front of the customer while the frog was still alive. She felt that this is an extreme act of cruelty to animals. In the video, the frog is kept alive in a kitchen until someone places an order. The frog is then stabbed by the chef’s knife and stripped clean of its inedible innards. However, the frog can be seen twitching and its eyes blinking while served on an iced platter. After the sashimi bits are taken off, the rest of the frog is simmered to make a soup.

“She is a famous beauty,” Lagerfeld said of Choupette. “She is nine months old. [Model] Baptiste [Giaconi] gave her to me for Christmas to watch for two weeks when he was away but then I refused to give her back. I thought she was too cute. She is like a kept woman. She has a strong personality. She has lunch and dinner with me on the table, with her own food. She doesn’t touch my food. She doesn’t want to eat on the floor. She sleeps under a pillow and she even knows how to use an iPad. She has two personal maids, for both night and day. She is beyond spoiled. … “We do keep a diary. When I am not there, the maids take down, in little books, everything she did, from what she ate, to how she behaved, if she was tired, and if she wasn’t sleeping. In the nine months, we already have almost 600 pages. … I think it could be funny to make a little book of Choupette’s diary.”

It was reported yesterday that Ms. Lauryn Hill has been charged with three counts of misdemeanor failure to file taxes. These charges were incurred for the years of 2005-2007, during a time in which Ms. Hill had removed herself and her family from society, in order to keep them safe, healthy, and free from danger. In response to these charges, Ms. Hill has issued the following statement

But in some cases of genetic sexual attraction, the feelings are mutual. A Canadian woman identified as ‘Sally’ and her biological son felt immediately attracted to one another upon meeting again, 30 years after the boy’s birth. Their physical relationship developed, and the young man could hardly believe that the woman he found to be a perfect match was his biological mother. American couple Rachel and Shawn met in 1999 when they were both 27 and have been an enthusiastically happy couple since. They sought each other out after learning that they shared a birth father. Rachel and Shawn – who are engaged but legally prohibited from getting married – discussed in a 2007 report with ABC News all the ways in which they are a perfectly ordinary couple. They are even devout Christians; but their deep love for one another is what they consider the most important part of their lives.

He got the girl — and he got paid! The high-school senior caught on camera locking lips with his hot-to-trot teacher won a bet with four of his buddies to see who would hook up with her first, The Post has learned. Eric Arty, 18, beat his pals — who each ponied up $100 — to win the jackpot as well as the affections of glamorous global-studies teacher Julie Warning, 26. “It was a bet with a group of his friends,” said Andrew Cabrera, a junior at Manhattan Theater Lab HS, where Warning worked until Tuesday, when she was reassigned to an administrative job. “They gave him the $500 [pot],’’ Cabrera said, referring to Eric and the four other contenders who made their wager about three months into the school year.

In 2009 alone, the state denied more than 700 plate requests including IHAV2P and IAMHIGH along with 100 requests beginning with the letter “F” and myriad proposals involving the number “69,” according to state documents. Questionable formulations are so common that a 20-person committee of motor vehicle staff members meets for an hour each month to review suspicious applications. State guidelines ban deceptive plates with letters such as FBI or confusing configurations like O0O0O and NOTAG as well as excretory, sexual, racial or drug references. “It’s the only time you get to talk like that at DMV, that’s for sure,” said Department of Motor Vehicles spokeswoman Melanie Stokes, who sits on the review panel. Less offensive and more playful ideas, including EWOBAMA, IPUNCHU and DMYANKI, have all been reviewed and rejected at the meetings. Some slip through. Pictures have been posted on the Internet of the Virginia-issued 370H55V — which has to be read upside-down

The State Department of the United States released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 on May 24, 2012. As in previous years, the reports are full of over-critical remarks on the human rights situation in nearly 200 countries and regions as well as distortions and accusations concerning the human rights cause in China. However, the United States turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation and kept silent about it. The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 is hereby prepared to reveal the true human rights situation of the United States to people across the world and urge the United States to face up to its own doings.

Kenneth Dejoie claims his genitals were badly burned while using this urinal inside the store’s men’s room. The five-page lawsuit was filed in El Paso County District Court on May 25. The lawsuit claims that Dejoie was “utilizing the urinal in the men’s restroom when it caused a jet of steam to shoot forth from the urinal and burn his genitals.” Dejoie claims he reported the incident to an employee who, according to the lawsuit claimed “we have that bathroom problem again,” and “this happens when the sink in the kitchen is running.”

The trouble started in 2001 when she noticed a small patch of swelling on her forehead which she initially ignored because it was not painful. When her condition was finally diagnosed four years later, doctors said she had seven tumours growing on her face. But she has been unable to pay the £60,000 or 600,000 yuan medical bill and has been forced to watch them slowly grow. The mother said: ‘I know that a lot of people see me as a monster but I am just a normal woman and a mother inside.’

The United Nations is considering a new Internet tax targeting the largest Web content providers, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, that could cripple their ability to reach users in developing nations. The European proposal, offered for debate at a December meeting of a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, would amend an existing telecommunications treaty by imposing heavy costs on popular Web sites and their network providers for the privilege of serving non-U.S. users, according to newly leaked documents. The documents (No. 1 No. 2) punctuate warnings that the Obama administration and Republican members of Congress raised last week about how secret negotiations at the ITU over an international communications treaty could result in a radical re-engineering of the Internet ecosystem and allow governments to monitor or restrict their citizens’ online activities.

The rescuers had rappelled from a helicopter, swaying in the brisk April winds as they bore down on a cave 7,000 feet up in a rugged desert mountain on the edge of this rural hamlet. There had been a call for help. Inside, they found a jug with about an inch of water, browned by floating leaves and twigs. They found a woman, Christie McNally, thirsty and delirious. And they found her husband, Ian Thorson, dead. The puzzle only deepened when the authorities realized that the couple had been expelled from a nearby Buddhist retreat in which dozens of adherents, living in rustic conditions, had pledged to meditate silently for three years, three months and three days. Their spiritual leader was a charismatic Princeton-educated monk whom some have accused of running the retreat as a cult.

Believe it or don’t, turtles are horrifically well endowed, and if the thought of learning more about the genitals of these oh-so-surprising reptiles doesn’t appeal to you, look away now. Last warning. Ok, here we go.

Leading up to the summits, fear-mongering by the city in conjunction with the media reached new lows. Business people were advised “to dress down” and “not wear suits” because they would be targeted by protesters. People who lived in condo buildings around the south loop were advised to leave town for the weekend. Many businesses closed, and news stations showed footage of shops boarding up their windows. The National Guard was on call, and even more startling, Milwaukee Red Cross was told to prepare for a possible evacuation of Chicago. Such propaganda greatly affects the average citizen. People were afraid to go downtown to protest, observe, or go about other business. The City of Chicago, media, and the federal government pooled their resources to scare American citizens from peacefully assembling. In a supposed free and democratic society, are congratulations in order for subversively preventing free speech and the right to peacefully assemble?

The affidavit said that on May 4, Gutierrez’s daughter began acting strangely in her first-grade classroom, talking to people who were not there and saying she could hear “banging in her head.” A school counselor called Gutierrez to report what was going on, and Gutierrez said, “Don’t call EMS and don’t call (Child Protective Services), I’m on my way,” the affidavit said. Gutierrez picked the girl up from school, took her home and then called for paramedics, the affidavit said. The girl was tested at a hospital, which returned a positive result for PCP, a powerful and illegal hallucinogen, the affidavit said. She was removed from the home and placed with a family member. Gutierrez also tested positive for the drug, the affidavit said. The girl told investigators that Gutierrez made her lunch that day, and that after she ate it, she felt “crazy and dizzy,” and her lunch meat tasted like “fireworks,” the affidavit said. She called the drug “angel dust”

The unhappy Scrooge McDucks of the world no longer have to rely on their butlers, congressmen, yacht bartenders, or car-elevator repair men to help them deal with the challenges of immense wealth. Big banks are now standing ready to help the superrich cope, with psychological “wealth counseling” services galore.

The flyers, which have been sent to thousands of potential customers around the country to promote a sale, offended the more delicate of Harvey Nichols’ client list. They show a woman with a damp patch on her orange trousers next to the slogan: ‘The Harvey Nichols Sale… Try To Contain Your Excitement.’ Thanks Jasmine

According to the report, the number of U.S. citizens who died in terrorist attacks increased by two between 2010 and 2011; overall, a comparable number of Americans are crushed to death by their televisions or furniture each year.

Amid a number of reports of massive and bizarre radiation readouts coming from experts, eyewitnesses, radiation facilities, and a key choice news outlet, it has now come out that one of the largest nuclear bases is currently running a ‘nuclear containment exercise’. The Minot Airforce Base exercise, running in North Dakota, reportedly involves the use of B-52 aircrafts. The news comes after a developing story arose over the potential cover-up of a nuclear situation stemming from near the border of Indiana and Michigan. Sources from near where the elevated levels of radiation were observed say that a Department of Homeland Security ‘hazmat’ fleet has been dispatched after ‘years’ of inactivity. The story first erupted after online geiger readings showed an unprecedented radiation spike in the area, with levels reaching as high as 7.139 counts per minute (CPM) over the average of between 5 and 6.

A man who was hitchhiking across the country for a memoir called “Kindness in America” was shot along a rural highway in northeastern Montana, police there say. Ray Dolin, 39, of West Virginia, approached a pickup truck on Saturday near Glasgow, Mont., thinking the driver was offering him a ride, Valley County Sheriff Glen Meier told The Associated Press. Dolin was shot in the arm.

A respected mainstream publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(FAZ), has reported that the infamous Houla massacre in Syria, which the US and NATO hoped would be the casus belli for their planned invasion, was in fact carried out by rebel forces.

A south St. Louis County Walmart was evacuated after a woman detained for shoplifting was making meth in the loss prevention office. St. Louis County police responded to the Walmart on Telegraph Road near Interstate 255 for a report of a woman shoplifting. Loss prevention had detained the woman, and she was placed in a holding area until officers arrived. While she was detained, she had a 20 ounce soda bottle in her purse that was cooking meth while she was in the holding room. Because meth is known to explode, the store was immediately evacuated. A hazmat team then had to respond to clean up the holding room

Most of us only consider diamonds as the most expensive materials in the world but there are many of them… here below are listed 16 costliest materials.

But in the rare-wine world, doubts are endemic; murkiness is built into a product that is concealed by tinted glass and banded wooden cases and opaque provenance and the fog of history. At the same time, the whole apparatus of the rare-wine market is about converting doubt into mystique. Most wealthy collectors want to spend big and drink famous labels, not necessarily ask questions or hear the answers. Guests at tastings don’t want to bite the hand that quenches them. Auctioneers may not want to risk losing consignments by nitpicking ambiguous bottles. Winemakers don’t like to talk about counterfeiting, for fear of the taint. Also, one thing not high on the FBI’s list of investigative priorities: billionaires getting snowed by wine forgers. It’s clear to everyone on this rarefied circuit that wine fraud is rampant. It’s also clear not many insiders feel an urgency to do anything about it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that 23 percent of high school students said they recently smoked marijuana, while 18 percent said they had puffed cigarettes. The survey asked teens about a variety of risky behaviors. For decades, the number of teens who smoke has been on the decline. Marijuana use has fluctuated, and recently rose. At times, pot and cigarette smoking were about the same level, but last year marked the first time marijuana use was clearly greater.

Apart from Guns N’ Roses, whose 1987 debut studio album “Appetite for Destruction” is a hard-rock landmark, the music of the Strip is often dismissed as disposable, and the scene is remembered as a cheerfully depraved Aqua Net playground. To get a fuller sense of what the Strip was really like, Sia Michel spoke with Duff McKagan, the former bassist of Guns N’ Roses, whose song “Paradise City” is sung by Mr. Cruise himself in the prologue; Bret Michaels of the glam-rockers Poison, which has several songs in “Rock of Ages”; and Sebastian Bach, the former lead singer of the New Jersey band Skid Row, who has a cameo. These are excerpts from the conversations.

“I used LSD from approximately 1972 to 1974. Throughout that period of time I used the LSD approximately ten to fifteen times. I would ingest the LSD on a sugar cube or in a hard form of gelatin. I would usually take the LSD when I was by myself. I have no words to explain the effect the LSD had on me, although, I can say it was a positive life changing experience for me and I am glad I went through that experience.”

Almost the exact moment I put pressure on my tonsil a giant colony (that really is the best word) unveiled itself from the part of my tonsils that are hidden. It was the most disgusting event my body as ever put on. At least 15 of them – on each tonsil – were popping out LIKE POPCORN. Giant pieces of yellow, smelly, popcorn. I didn’t know I had that much tonsil hidden away back there not to mention the very deep tunnels going through them where these tonsil stones were apparently hiding. Don’t even get me started on the taste…it wasn’t just an explosion of the stones…I still have nightmares of this you know. I emptied them on to a kleenex and showed my mom who was absolutely disgusted.

Sometime during the video chat, things went horribly wrong. “His manhood or his ego was challenged and he said something along the lines of, ‘I’ll show you,'” Gallagher said. “He thought he was clowning around, trying to shock the other party on the Internet site.” That’s when the teen picked up his older brother’s gun and, believing it was unloaded, put it to his head and pulled the trigger, police said.

A Trinity man arrested for allegedly fighting with his stepfather showed off his disdain for the constable who got him arrested in March by tattooing his leg with an explicit saying. “Woody Wallace can [explicit] my [explicit],” the tattoo read. Constable Woody Wallace said his office arrested Jonathan Thompson, 30, after he got in an altercation with his stepfather. Authorities arrested him on a charge of terroristic threat on Monday. While police were booking Thompson into jail, they saw the tattoo. “They have to take pictures of all their tattoos and he said, ‘Make sure you get this one right here,'” Wallace said. “Then they all said, ‘Woody, you got to get in here.’ I saw it and said, ‘Is that real?’ and he said ‘Yup!'”

Yang, who co-owns the store, refused to open the cash register and used bear-repellent spray on the two men. One man fled and Yang grabbed the other man and held him at the store counter, spanking him and then holding him by his legs.

Just in case police in Brooklyn, New York, weren’t aware that it was break-in day, accused burglars notified them via Facebook status update. Here’s the helpful way in which the day’s events were posted by Derrin Dyson, one of 14 accused accomplices in a burglary gang known as the “Brower Boys”: “It’s break-in day on the avenue.” Unfortunately for the Brower Boys, alleged gang members had unwittingly friended the Brooklyn Police Department’s Officer Michael Rodriguez on Facebook.

The use of antidepressants has increased dramatically over the past 25 years, says Michael Thomas of Idaho State University in Pocatello. Around 80 per cent of each drug passes straight through the human body without being broken down, and so they are present in waste water. In most communities, water purification systems cannot filter out these pharmaceuticals. “They just fly right through,” says Thomas, which means they ultimately find their way into the water supply.

The mayor and his son allegedly began their scheme to hack into the site and intimidate its operators and participants starting on 6 February. Over the next two days, Joseph Roque allegedly posed as an interested contributor so as to send messages to the site owner and learn his identity. Meeting with a lack of success in this subtle approach, Roque the Younger then allegedly took this direct approach instead: he Googled terms including “hacking a Go Daddy site,” “html hacking tutorial,” “how to hack a [Provider’s name] password,” and “how to hack a [Provider’s name] account.” Here’s how the alleged hacking then went down, according to the FBI affidavit: On 8 February, Roque the Younger managed to reset the password for the email account associated with the site’s domain name and to cancel that domain name. While he was in the account, he allegedly snapped a bunch of screenshots of emails from contributors, some of which gave away the contributors’ identities.

A passenger at Detroit Metro Airport was asked for his boarding pass and ID, but responded: ‘Yes, and I have two bombs and three guns’ while laughing, according to TSA’s “Blogger Bob” Burns. After being asked not to say that, the passenger said ‘I do not have two bombs, only one bomb,’ according to Burns. A passenger at Preston Smith International Airport in Lubbock, TX , said Burns, told an airline employee that they were going to blow up American Airlines. When asked what he meant by that, he replied, ‘You’re about to find out,’ according to Burns. A passenger at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas said ‘There is a bomb in my bag,’ after being told her luggage had missed her flight, according to Burns.

Alkaloids constitute a very large group of natural nitrogen-containing compounds with diverse effects on the human organism. A large variety of plant-produced alkaloids have strong pharmacological effects, and are used as toxins, stimulants, pharmaceuticals or recreational drugs, including caffeine, nicotine, morphine, quinine, strychnine, atropine and cocaine. Atropine, used to dilate the pupils of the eye, and the addictive drug cocaine are both tropane alkaloids which possess two distinctive, inter-connecting five- and seven-membered rings.

“Media Burn” by Ant Farm. Excerpt from Ant Farm’s classic video art piece examining and satirizing the media, particularly the impact of television. On July 4, 1975, what a TV newscaster described as a “media circus” assembles at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Stadium. A pyramid of television sets are stacked, dowsed with kerosene, and set ablaze. Then a modified 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz, piloted by two drivers who are guided only by a video monitor between their bucket seats, crashes through the pyramid destroying the TV sets

Excerpt from Ant Farm’s classic video art piece examining and satirizing the media, particularly the impact of television. On the Fourth of July, 1975, artist-president John F. Kennedy (Doug Hall) delivers a speech about the media: “Now I ask you, my fellow Americans: Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?” at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Stadium. You can watch the full video HERE.

When I saw this I realized The Plasmatics borrowed heavily from the piece for their video for ‘The Damned’

Here’s a tip for all the would-be drug runners out there – don’t move kilos of cocaine in a car with a personalized license plate reading “SMUGGLER.” Federal investigators contend a woman was caught in Blaine doing just that late last year. According to recently released court documents, Homeland Security agents in mid-December received a tip of an expected drug deal at a Bellingham Pizza Hut. Writing the court, a criminal investigator with Homeland Security Investigations said he and other agents set up surveillance at the Pizza Hut on Samish Way after being told a woman taking cocaine to Canada might be stopping there. As agents looked on, the owner of a Blaine bed and breakfast called the Smuggler’s Inn pulled into the parking lot behind the wheel of a GMC Yukon, the HSI investigator told the court. The SUV’s license plate read SMUGGLER.

What makes Carrie’s condition all the more weird is that she doesn’t just drink urine from a glass. I watched this video of a program about her on the TLC channel, where she gathers up the courage to confess her habit to her friend Denise. During the confession, she describes in detail exactly what she does with the urine. Some of it goes in the regular way, through a glass. But then she puts some of it in a Neti pot and drinks it nasally. And some, she actually drinks through her eyes using an eye cup. She even brushes her teeth with it, and saves some so that she can rub aged urine all over her skin. Carrie says that it’s the nasal drinking that hurts the most. “The pain is different than any pain you’ve experienced.”

The CCFC, as the group is known, is concerned with two overlapping issues: the amount of time children spend in front of an ever-growing array of screens — TVs, computers, smartphones, tablets — and the marketing messages they are subjected to while glued to them. Under Linn’s direction, the group has taken on some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. It forced Kellogg to remove SpongeBob SquarePants and other cartoon characters from the packaging of foods that were light on nutritional value. It got Hasbro to shelve plans for a new line of dolls based on the sexpot pop act the Pussycat Dolls (“Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?”) that made Bratz dolls look like fat prudes. (If you aren’t familiar with Bratz dolls, by the way, they’re the ones that make Barbie look like a fat prude.) And when Linn found out that a Needham company called BusRadio was airing advertisements on school buses, she organized a campaign that led to the demise of the business

The 2004 auction’s routine included a white man in blackface, identified in the footage as investment banker James Montgomery, CEO of the Santa Monica, Calif., firm Montgomery & Co. In addition to blackface makeup and the wig, Montgomery wore a leopard-print toga and an arm band made to look like it consisted of animal teeth. During a lull in the auction, Frey refers to Montgomery and comments, “See how boring money management and stock investment is, people? It’s not nearly as much fun as, like, professional basketball.” In response to the video, Congress of Racial Equality national spokesperson Niger Innis has called on President Obama to remove Hanks’ narration from his campaign film. Innis called the incident “an orchestrated, heinous, and racist ‘Stepin Fetchit’ routine that Mr. Hanks was a part of.”

The world’s largest and most resilient BitTorrent site plans to redefine “cloud computing” with a plan to move at least some of its servers onto unmanned drones miles above Sweden. In a Sunday blog post, The Pirate Bay announced new “Low Orbit Server Stations” that will house the site’s servers and files on unmanned, GPS-controlled, aircraft drones.

Big Ladies. Thanks Jasmine

In another astonishing development in the Megaupload saga, a judge in New Zealand’s High Court has declared the order used to seize Kim Dotcom’s assets as “null and void”. The blunder, which occurred because the police applied for the wrong type of court order, means that the Megaupload founder could have his property returned.

Lunatic in my evolution class asking the most absurd question and gets angry when the Prof (Dr. Kajiura) doesn’t know how to answer it. Context: The slide we were on just before was about Female Sexual Selection. For instance, female peacocks have selection in their mates, preferring the males with the bigger train of feathers.. Somehow she went off on some tangent with a question about how does Evolution play a role in the killing of all black people… Dr. Kajiura tried to answer her question even though he had no idea what she was talking about. She repeated her question 4-5 more times and it turned into this craziness you see here… Clearly, this person has some SERIOUS emotional issues within herself and the discussion of PEACOCKS was the catalyst to the unleashing of this insanity. She was escorted out of class and I heard she was tasered and arrested by the police.

It sounds like the bizzare script of a Hollywood B-movie. In a parallel universe the Nazis have won the war, Adolf Hitler moves to LA where he mingles with the stars of the silver screen while running his evil empire from a luxurious ranch deep in the LA hills. But during the 1930s, American sympathisers were so confident this exact scenario was actually going happen they spent millions building a deluxe compound ready for their fuhrer’s imminent arrival.

“Twice a month, the library in Dilbeek welcomes about 10 children to introduce them to the magical world of books,” Wauters explains, citing a report in the local newspaper. “A representative of the library in question is quoted in the De Morgen report as saying there’s no budget to compensate people who read to the kids, relying instead on volunteers.” “Each time a dozen or so children attend,” library worker Alexandra Vervaecke told the newspaper. “A while ago we were suddenly contacted by SABAM and told that we have to pay. I have done the calculations: for us it would amount to 250 euro per year.” That would amount to over $300 for just this one small local library. Vervaecke added that even older works, like Grimm’s Fairy Tales, are not exempt from SABAM’s fees, because any current edition of the stories would be under copyright.

In yet another sexting scandal involving minors, an 8th grade boy in Massachussets allegedly sold nude “sexts” of his 8th-grade girlfriend to his classmates for $5 apiece, ABC News reports. Sexting – the sending of nude pictures via text message – is nothing new among U.S. teens: About one in five teens admits to participating in sexting, according to the National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. But the selling of these sexts to other teens is far less common. “It’s horrifying, it’s absolutely horrifying,” a mother told ABC News. Police said that because the girl is a minor and because the sexting transaction involved money, this may be a child pornography case.

Using a medically prescribed form of heroin to treat addicts is less costly and more beneficial in the long run than regular methadone therapy, a recent study suggests. The prescribed form of heroin, known diacetylmorphine, is generally considered more expensive than methadone therapy. But researchers have found that addicts who are given the pricier option stay in treatment longer and are less likely to relapse, and therefore be involved with drug-related criminal activity such as robberies to support a drug habit, leading to long-term savings. The findings, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, hint that heroin-assisted therapy is both medically helpful for patients and an economically-wise choice for society.

But even if we gave up all of our privacy, even if we gave up all of our liberties and our freedoms, and even if we gave the government all of our stuff they still would not be able to keep us safe. It is inevitable that evil people are going to do evil things, and if you are counting on the Obama administration to keep you safe then you are being delusional. Obama is not going to save us from anything. But Obama will gladly take away our rights and our freedoms if the American people allow him to. The Obama administration seems to have an endless lust for more power. Sadly, if we do give away our rights it will have some very serious consequences. If we freely give away all of the rights that we have been given under the U.S. Constitution it will be incredibly difficult to ever get them back.

The international swimsuit model accused of being the mastermind of a worldwide drug ring run out of a Hollywood apartment has been arrested in Australia after skipping out on bail over a month ago. Simone Farrow, who was once the face of the Ed Hardy brand of bikinis, used 19 different aliases to ship methamphetamine around the world by FedEx and even the postal service, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency and Australian police.

Gravitational Shift: It’s interesting to note that serotonin is once again the target of a culturewide chemical invasion—except that the serotonin drugs we favor today shift human experience in the opposite direction from LSD. SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) like paroxetine (Paxil) and fluoxetine (Prozac) are the most prescribed pills in the U.S., used to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and undefined feelings of ickiness. Instead of getting rid of serotonin, these drugs block the reabsorption process so that serotonin keeps piling up in the synapses. The result: an extra-thick blanket of serotonin that filters out the intrusions of anguish and anxiety, making our inner worlds more secure. Instead of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, they help us turn off, tune out, and drop in—into a solipsistic safety zone, protected from too much reality.

When people download a film from Netflix to a flatscreen, or turn on web radio, they could be alerting unwanted watchers to exactly what they are doing and where they are. Spies will no longer have to plant bugs in your home – the rise of ‘connected’ gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people ‘bug’ their own homes, says CIA director David Petraeus. The CIA claims it will be able to ‘read’ these devices via the internet – and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the home. Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps – and chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells. The resultant chorus of ‘connected’ gadgets will be able to be read like a book – and even remote-controlled, according to CIA CIA Director David Petraeus, according to a recent report by Wired’s ‘Danger Room’ blog.

Peter and Patty Findlay own what’s undoubtedly the strangest house in Aspen, Colo.: a multilevel home shaped like a giant mushroom. The mind-altering abode, built in the 1970s by architect Andre Ulrych while he was supposedly under the influence of one or more hallucinogens, is designed in the shape of a nautilus shell, and, according to Patty Findlay, “There’s always two to three ways out of every space.” (Drug-induced paranoia, perhaps?) Andy Warhol once visited the Magic Mushroom House, and Hugh Hefner threw a pajama party here (we’d need to be on ‘shrooms to be a part of that).

A baby rabbit born with no ears was being filmed by a news team when the cameraman stepped on him by mistake on Wednesday. The bunny didn’t suffer, said the distraught director of the zoo in Germany who had hoped to turn the rare rabbit into a media star.

Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices themselves, more similar than ever to a personal computer, may allow hackers or even Samsung to see and hear you and your family, and collect extremely personal data.

Now in his mid-eighties and living in San Jose, Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency operation that covertly tested lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to 1964. “I remember that night very clearly, yes I do,” he said in a recent interview. “I was paranoid. I got down to where I thought everyone was against me. The whole world was against me.” After the day had bled into night on Dec. 20, 1957, Ritchie returned to his office in the Post Office Building and retrieved two service revolvers from his locker. He was going rogue. “I decided if they want to get rid of me, I’ll help them. I’ll just go out and get my guns from my office and hold up a bar,” Ritchie recalls. “I thought, ‘I can get enough money to get my girlfriend an airline ticket back to New York, and I’ll turn myself in.’ But I was unsuccessful.”

✪ New ‘legal’ LSD-like drug under investigation

A friend of Von Keisenberg created a website for Dime and sold the drug online, at $30 for two capsules, making it one of the cheapest synthetic highs on the market. A user of Dime called Nick (not his real name) told Close Up the new drug, which is snorted, was potent. “It’s very heavy, very intense. You can feel nauseaous for the first half an hour or so. After that you’re just enjoying basically everything for at least a good six to ten hours. It’s an all round party buzz.” Dime’s marketing said the drug brings on an “amazing high”, “beautiful visuals” and “increased energy”. Illegal substance But Close Up commissioned the drug to be tested at ESR, the government-owned laboratory. Tests revealed Dime contains 25C-NBOMe, a Class C drug, which is an analogue – a modified version – of a Class A drug called “DOB”. The drug 25C-NBOMe is a designer hallucinogen which been in the market in Europe and Australia for up to five years, according to Dr Paul Quigley

For almost forty years, High Times magazine has been the premier advocacy rag for marijuana, serving the passionate smoker much as Fox News and MSNBC serve the partisan political junkie. But in their effort to push out “the word of marijuana … the word of legalization … the word of growing,” as managing editor Natasha Lewin has put it, magazine staffers (and one can confidently say readers too) have inevitably pushed up against the law. Some are not just blowing smoke, but smuggling and dealing it too. Sometimes by the ton. The latest alleged High Times trafficker is Matthew Woodstock Stang, known as “Magazine Guy” in the marijuana underworld. By day he’s employed as an advertising executive and senior writer for the magazine; by night, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, he’s a wholesaler in one of the city’s largest and longest-running marijuana rings.

The leaf, which is indigenous to Southeast Asia, has been around for thousands of years, and proponents argue that it is safe and effective for many maladies, while having fewer side effects and being less addictive than pharmaceutical alternatives, such as oxycodone. In small doses, they say, kratom provides an energy boost — the plant is in the coffee family — and in larger doses it creates a mellow, sedating effect, acting on the opioid receptors. “Kratom makes people feel pain free, strong, active and optimistic,” according to the Website Kratom.com. It has multiple functions, said the site, which sells kratom leaves, powder and extracts from Thailand — “as a strong and reliable herbal painkiller, to relieve depression and as a social and professional enhancer to intensify communicational skills and induce higher motivation.”

For all my success with the Ramones, I carried around fury and intensity during my career. I had an image, and that image was anger. I was the one who was always scowling, downcast. I tried to make sure I looked like that when I was getting my picture taken. When I was younger, I was ready to go off at any time. My wife, Linda, and I would go out to the Limelight in New York, and I would see people and be able to freeze them with a look. People were even too scared of me to tell me that people were scared of me. I never felt out of control. It was just the way I lived my life. I was the neighborhood bully. I even beat up Joey, our singer, one time, before we were in the band. He was late to meet me—so I punched him. I was 21; he was 19. We were meeting up to go to a movie. There was no excuse for being late.

The sexuality of music is usually referred to in terms of rhythm, it is the beat that commands a directly physical response. Music with the heavy, hard beat got the name “Rock and Roll” when a disc jockey coined the term from sex in the back seat of a car. The rock beat is Satan’s sound of lawlessness. The rock beat is musical perversion. Every knowledgeable musician knows that the term “rock” really means a shameful act of lust. But that is not the only problem! The beat of rock is nothing new. Pagan, animistic tribes had the “rock beat” long before it came to America. They use the driving beat to get “high” and bring them into an altered state of consciousness. Traditional drumming and dancing techniques are designed to achieve the Shamanic State of Consciousness. You see, the beat is a vehicle for demon infestation.

People have been asking me what secular albums are “safe” to listen to. As a good guideline, ask yourself this… “Does the band / music you wish to listen to include any of the following themes: Rebellion Violence Nihilism (belief in nothing) / Apathy Escapism / Suicide Drugs / Alcoholism Sexual Perversion / Fornication / Pornography Self-Mutilation Dissonant / Offensive Sound The Occult / Satanism Anti-God / Anti-Authority Cult-like Organization, Terrorism If so, you should steer well clear. The Bible, God’s Word, teaches us anything that promotes or embraces any of these factors is predominantly anti-Christian, and against all that God’s Word stands for. The following are just a few God-haters you should definitely avoid like the plague…

✪ Boston Bans Slam Dancing, Mosh Pits

Slam dancing, or “moshing” in a mosh pit, have been staples at punk, metal and hardcore concerts for decades. Now the city of Boston is banning the dancing, stating that is is dangerous and difficult for event staff to control. Mosh pits and the slam dancing that defines them are now banned activities after police cited a city club for allowing violent mosh pit dancing. Police vow a crackdown on what they called “dangerous behavior” and a “public safety hazard.”

Pork donuts may not be palatable to Americans or Europeans, but the parent company of Dunkin’ Donuts and the Baskin-Robbins ice cream chains is catering to local tastes in China, where it aims to open another 100 stores in the next two to three years.

Which product at this year’s South by Southwest technology conference received more attention than perhaps any other? Homeless people as wireless transmitters. A marketing agency touched off a wave of criticism and debate when it hired members of the local homeless population to walk around carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices, offering conferencegoers Internet access in exchange for donations. BBH Labs, the innovation unit of the international marketing agency BBH, outfitted 13 volunteers from a homeless shelter with the devices, business cards and T-shirts bearing their names: “I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot.” They were told to go to the most densely packed areas of the conference, which has become a magnet for those who want to chase the latest in technology trends. The smartphone-toting, social-networking crowds often overwhelm cellular networks in the area, creating a market that BBH Labs hoped to serve with the “Homeless Hotspots” project, which it called a “charitable experiment.”

KONY 2012 is less of a documentary than it is a highly efficient infomercial that is tailor-made for the Facebook generation, using state-of-the-art marketing techniques to make its point. Young people like “underground movements” and want to feel like they are changing the world. KONY 2012 taps into these needs to bring about something that is not “hip” or “underground” at all: A military operation in Uganda. Not only that, it urges the participants of the movement to order stuff, to wear bracelets that are associated with an online profile and to record their actions in social media. This makes KONY 2012 the first artificially created movement that is fully track-able, monitor-able and quantifiable by those who engendered it. In other words, what appears to be a movement “from the people” is actually a new way for the elite to advance its agenda.

September 11 provided the federal government with a bullet-proof excuse to further absorb and integrate state and local law enforcement, a project that has been underway at least since the late 1960s. Over the last decade, the feds have established a number of efforts to nationalize law enforcement and create a number of organizations designed to supposedly “protect the homeland” from not only terrorists – most handled by the FBI and the CIA – but all sorts of domestic criminals, including those who engage in victimless crimes such as drug use and prostitution. There are now dozens of organizations feeding off tax dollars dispensed by the feds – from FEMA’s Citizen Corps to Volunteers in Police Service and Infragard and beyond. In many ways, these federally-funded and organized groups rival the police state apparatus active in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Officers were not only interested in why Jackson was at the warehouse, but why it was he didn’t have on any clothes. When questioned, Jackson said he was at the warehouse catching up on work and was naked because he was hot. When officers took Jackson back to his workstation, presumably to get his clothes, they saw child pornography pulled up on his computer. “His job description didn’t include prancing around naked while looking at child pornography,” Assistant District Attorney Martin Purselley said in a press release statement. When police ordered Jackson to present some type of identification he told them it could be found in the glove compartment of his car. Officers not only found the ID, the glove box also contained a bag of what appeared to be marijuana. Jackson apparently learned little from the July arrest since he was taken into custody three months later for standing in his garage, naked as children rode by on their bicycles. Thanks Jasmine

A Fort Worth police captain has been fired after investigators found the officer had been using his city-issued computer to search porn sites. The captain, L.A. Harris, has also been accused of self-gratification while on duty in a city facility and in uniform. Harris had been assigned as one of two overnight duty captains. An internal affairs investigation found Harris had visited the sites while on duty over a six month period. In a statement, Chief Jeff Halstead called Harris’ behavior “absolutely deplorable.”

When I was growing up, police in America generally treated women with gentleness and respect. It was generally understood that women were not to be thrown around or mistreated by police unless they were being openly violent. But in most areas of the United States those days are long gone. Sadly, many police officers seem to make it a point to be especially mean and degrading to women. All over the country women are being openly abused and humiliated by police. In America today, women are being yanked around by their hair by police, women are being pepper sprayed directly in the face by police, and women are being brutally strip-searched in front of leering male police officers. This is not how a civilized nation should be treating women and there is no excuse for treating women like dogs. The incidents that you are about to read about are absolutely shocking. They reveal just how far America has fallen.

Not all special effects are digital – fake babies are still constructed for film and television work, and for collectors who want highly realistic replicas.

✰ Baby eats cocaine found in motel room

It was in room 223, Jahmai’s mother says he found a spoon under the bed, and put it in his mouth. His grandmother was the first to notice. “She looked at it and she’s like, look at this,” said April Portis, Jahmai’s mother. “I took it from her and on the back of the spoon it was all burnt up and on the top of the spoon was the residue from the cocaine on it.” Portis called police. She says an officer performed a test on the spot, and confirmed cocaine was on the spoon.

Sacred cows make the best hamburgers, says the activist who defaced an Australian icon. It’s been eight years since David Burgess scaled up to the top of Sydney’s gleaming white Opera House and lashed it with bright red paint. It took three coats before the act was complete. NO WAR screamed the sign. The highly-visible protest against the looming Iraq war split the Australian community between those who were shocked at the wanton vandalism of the national icon, and those who applauded the message. Ultimately, it landed Mr Burgess and his activist peer Will Saunders in jail for nine months’ weekend detention for malicious damage. “I won’t say there were days I didn’t wake up feeling utterly miserable, but you couldn’t really regret what we’d done,” Burgess says. “A lot of people said it gave them a little bit of happiness or hope on what was otherwise a very awful day.

The so-called face Slimmer was launched in Japan, late last year, by a well-known cosmetic company called Glim. It’s a weird-looking rubbery thing that looks a lot like the mouth of a blow-up doll, and it supposedly solves your sagging face problem while giving you that coveted duck-face look. You know, the one every “cool” teenager poses with in their Facebook photos. Now, unlike most other Japanese inventions, the Face Slimmer isn’t high-tech. In fact it’s as low tech as they come, all you have to do is put it in your mouth and start exercising your face muscles. Think of it as a squeeze punch for your mouth…

A Pennsylvania couple trapped, of all things, a purple squirrel on Sunday. Percy and Connie Emert, of Jersey Shore, Pa. caught the unusual animal when trying to keep birds safe from the rodents. “We have bird feeders out in our yard, and the squirrels are constantly into them,” said Jersey Shore resident Connie Emert. “My husband traps them and then sets them free elsewhere so they don’t get into your bird feeders.” Emert said she had spotted a purple squirrel on her property but no one believed her. “I kept telling my husband I saw a purple one out in the yard. ‘Oh sure you did’ he kept telling me,” said Emert. “Well, he checked the trap around noon on Sunday and sure enough, there it was.”

The BZ daily reported on Wednesday that the deceased, Carsten Srock, was found with his limbs expertly carved off with either an axe or large knife. The body pieces were then wrapped fastidiously in plastic bags and cling-wrap, and left to sit in the two-room flat for around three weeks. His head was found, partially cooked, by the police. Prosecutors on the case told the BZ they believe the victim was “murdered for sexual pleasure.”

The historic seizure of 15 tons of pure methamphetamine in western Mexico, equal to half of all meth seizures worldwide in 2009, feeds growing speculation that the country could become a world platform for meth production, not just a supplier to the United States. The sheer size of the bust announced late Wednesday in Jalisco state suggests involvement of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, a major international trafficker of cocaine and marijuana that has moved into meth production and manufacturing on an industrial scale. Army officials didn’t say what drug gangs could have been behind the dozens of blue barrels filled with powdered meth. Army Gen. Gilberto Hernandez Andreu said the meth was ready for packaging. There was no information on where the drugs were headed. Jalisco has long been considered the hub of the Sinaloa cartel’s meth production and trafficking. Meanwhile, meth use is growing in the United States, already the world’s biggest market for illicit drugs.

Looks pretty authentic, yes? Well the image of a snow-covered road and cars never aired on the BBC, wasn’t taken in Lutterworth, and it certainly wasn’t submitted by anyone with the name Shanda Lear. (Chandelier, anyone?) Kirton, a truck driver and photographer, created the image in Photoshop and then made it look like it had been on TV. After the Mail somehow discovered the image, it published a story headlined, “Not a name to make light of! BBC News shows picture taken by viewer called Shanda Lear.”

Women in the northern German town of Lüchow have expressed their dissatisfaction with the design of two urinals in the men’s toilet of a museum dedicated to the Rolling Stones. They are shaped like red lips, similar to the legendary logo of the band, but they look more feminine, and they lack tongues. Local activist Roda Armbruster wants the urinals removed. “That’s discrimination against women,” she told regional broadcaster NDR. “Why does it have to be a woman’s mouth? If it had been based on the emblem of the Stones with the tongue, it would have been OK. But the tongue’s been left out and they really looks like women’s mouths.”

To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication. “We need some gender equity here,” she told HuffPost. “The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we’re going to do that to women, why not do that to men?”

Quick note: Though you may have read about this property before, most articles have simply reprinted the same stock real estate photos over and over. As always, all pictures are my own work, and I don’t think you’ll find a tour like this anywhere else.

One result of that pressure is this legislation (H.R. 658 — see conference report for more details), which authorizes appropriations for the FAA through fiscal 2014. Unfortunately, nothing in the bill would address the very serious privacy issues raised by drone aircraft. This bill would push the nation willy-nilly toward an era of aerial surveillance without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected. Congress — and to the extent possible, the FAA — need to impose some rules (such as those we proposed in our report) to protect Americans’ privacy from the inevitable invasions that this technology will otherwise lead to. We don’t want to wonder, every time we step out our front door, whether some eye in the sky is watching our every move.

Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders. The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980. The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

Nootropic (new-tro-pik) is the term for supplements, also known as smart drugs, that improve brain function. They can be food substances like phenethylamine and L-Theanine, found in chocolate and green tea, respectively. Nootropics also include extracted and purified components of medicinal plants, as well as substances synthesized from chemical precursors, such as piracetam, the world’s first official nootropic (piracetam was created in 1964 in Belgium by a team of scientists whose leader, Dr. Corneliu E. Giurgea, coined the term). Since then piracetam has been widely used as a cognitive enhancer and to treat neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Essential work on planned reservoirs in Zimbabwe has stopped because mermaids have been hounding workers away, according to the country’s Water Resources Minister. Samuel Sipepa Nkomo told a Zimbabwean parliamentary committee that terrified workers are refusing to return to the sites, near the towns of Gokwe and Mutare. Minister Nkomo said the only way to solve the problem was to brew traditional beer and carry out any rites to appease the spirits.

Last September, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley announced that they had developed a method of visually reconstructing images from peoples’ minds, by analyzing their brain activity. Much to the dismay of tinfoil hat-wearers everywhere, researchers from that same institution have now developed a somewhat similar system, that is able to reconstruct words that people have heard spoken to them. Instead of being used to violate our civil rights, however, the technology could instead allow the vocally-disabled to “speak.”

Nazi surgical tools formerly owned by an SS Major and possibly used in a concentration camp during the Holocaust are being put up for auction. A wooden box of instruments belonging to Anton Burger, commandant of the Theresienstadt camp in what was then Czechoslovakia, is being sold off by the widow of a Jewish man whose parents were Holocaust survivors.

The international hackers group known as Anonymous turned the tables on the F.B.I. by listening in on a conference call last month between the bureau, Scotland Yard and other foreign police agencies about their joint investigation of the group and its allies. Anonymous posted a 16-minute recording of the call on the Web on Friday and crowed about the episode in via Twitter: “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

Some photos with no backstory are making the rounds, showing what appears to be an Indianapolis police sniper checking out his post in the rafters of Lucas Oil Stadium in the hours or days before the Super Bowl, a post that would be manned when the game began. Yes, we know there’s nothing surprising about trained marksmen working the biggest sporting event of the year. We also know it’s pretty damn cool to see what the Super Bowl snipers are working with. It’s standard operating procedure to have an invisible law enforcement presence at any high-profile event, let alone one with the attendance and attention the Super Bowl receives. And remember, there are all kinds of politicians and other assorted rich people around. You never know what could happen, though the imagination conjures up increasingly insane and horrifying scenarios, and also the criminally underrated Black Sunday. It’s just never a bad idea to have a sniper rifle around.

While the Western media act like the Syrian government is wantonly and indiscriminately killing its own people without provocation, an independent investigation has found a different reality on the ground. Specifically, over 160 monitors from the Arab League – comprised of both allies and mortal enemies of Syria – toured Syria and published a report on January 27th showing that the situation has been mischaracterized.

Orangutans living in captivity will soon start using iPads for primate play-dates, using Skype or FaceTime to interact with their brethren in other zoos, according to zookeepers. The great apes have been playing with iPads for about six months at the Milwaukee County Zoo, and they’ve been such a hit that other zoos plan to introduce them, too. The “Apps for Apes” program started after a zookeeper commented online about getting some iPads for her gorilla charges. Someone donated a used iPad, and it turned out the gorillas didn’t care for it. But the orangutans loved it, as the LA Times says.

SOMETIMES it’s hard to tell how much coffee costs, even if you know what you spent. At least that’s the case with many of the single-serve brewing machines that are soaring in popularity. For example, the Nespresso Arpeggio costs $5.70 for 10 espresso capsules, while the Folgers Black Silk blend for a K-Cup brewed-coffee machine is $10.69 for 12 pods. But that Nespresso capsule contains 5 grams of coffee, so it costs about $51 a pound. And the Folgers, with 8 grams per capsule, works out to more than $50 a pound. That’s even more expensive than all but the priciest coffees sold by artisanal roasters, the stuff of coffee snobs.

A woman died from a massive allergic reaction that could have been caused by the glue in her hair extensions, a pathologist said yesterday. Atasha Graham, 34, who had used hair extensions for 14 years, collapsed after clubbing until the early hours. Home Office pathologist Michael Heath told the inquest into her death that the latex glue used to apply her extensions – or the solvent for removing old ones – may have been to blame.

How did an image of a pig — the infamous ’60s-era epithet by protesters for police officers — wind up on a decal used on as many as 30 Vermont State Police cruisers? State officials Thursday pointed to the failure of the quality assurance office within the Vermont Correctional Industries Print Shop in St. Albans to detect a prisoner-artist’s addition made four years ago to the traditional state police logo. A spot on the shoulder of the cow in the state emblem was modified into a pig.

What rapper Mic Righteous was actually trying to say was ‘Free Palestine’. But Palestine, it seems, is now a dirty word on the BBC.

Soldiers could have their minds plugged directly into weapons systems, undergo brain scans during recruitment and take courses of neural stimulation to boost their learning, if the armed forces embrace the latest developments in neuroscience to hone the performance of their troops. These scenarios are described in a report into the military and law enforcement uses of neuroscience, published on Tuesday, which also highlights a raft of legal and ethical concerns that innovations in the field may bring.

Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza has decided to go with the runner-up in the city’s parking sticker design contest, after a blogger questioned whether gang signs were in the artwork submitted by the winner. The sticker was picked as the winner in a city-wide contest and was designed by Herbie Pulgar, a15-year-old boy who attends a school for troubled youth. “I was trying to convey the love for Chicago, the love for our first responders,” he said. The theme of the contest was to honor city firefighters and police officers. The freshman said his design honored first responders, as he was saved from a fire when he was 4 years old. On Tuesday, the city clerk’s office began getting calls after a blogger said the hands in the artwork may be showing the symbol of a notorious gang. Some said both the heart and the shape of the hands in the image are evocative of gang symbols.

A US federal judge has thrown out an animal rights group’s lawsuit accusing SeaWorld of enslaving captive killer whales, ruling that orcas have no standing to seek the same constitutional rights as people. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) had accused the chain of aquatic theme parks of violating the rights of whales under the 13th amendment of the US constitution, which abolished slavery. The lawsuit, filed in the US district court of San Diego, listed as plaintiffs five performing orcas at SeaWorld’s parks in California and Florida: Tilikum, Katina, Corky, Kasatka and Ulises. “The only reasonable interpretation of the 13th amendment’s plain language is that it applies to persons and not to non-persons such as orcas,” US district judge Jeffrey Miller wrote in his ruling.

Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008“, and it was produced by the “National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism” for the Department of Homeland Security. As you will see detailed later on in this article, the most shocking part of this report is when it discusses the “ideological motivations” of potential terrorists. The report shamelessly attempts to portray red-blooded Americans that love liberty and that love their country as the enemy. Once upon a time, deeply patriotic Americans were considered to be the backbone of America, but today they are considered to be potential terrorists.

The development opens up the possibility of infertile men being able to father their own children rather than using donor sperm. Researchers in Germany and Israel were able to grow mouse sperm from a few cells in a laboratory dish. In a world first a team headed by Professor Stefan Schlatt, at Muenster University in Germany, were able to grow sperm by using germ cells. These are the cells in testicles that are responsible for sperm production. Scientists grew the sperm by surrounding the germ cells in a special compound called agar jelly to create an environment similar to that found in testicles.

“I pledge a lesson to queen’s frag and her United States of Hysteria, and to the wee puppet for witch’s hands. One Asian, under dog, invisible, with little tea and just rice for all.”

Archaeologist Mesut Alp said that the toy car, which is made out of stone, dates back to the late Stone Age and is thought to be 7,500 years old. The Culture and Tourism Director of Mardin, Davut Beliktay, said that the car is like a copy of cars today, adding that in its shape, the ancient toy also resembles a tractor. Beliktay also revealed that toy dolls and whistles, also made of stone, were found at sites in the area, “we believe that the whistles and dolls are 5,000 to 6,000 years old. The whistles are still in working condition,” he said.

Ruling in what it called a “tragically bizarre” case, an appeals court found that the estate of a man killed by a train while crossing the Edgebrook Metra station tracks can be held liable after a part of his body sent airborne by the collision struck and injured a bystander. In 2008, Hiroyuki Joho, 18, was hurrying in pouring rain with an umbrella over his head, trying to catch an inbound Metra train due to arrive in about five minutes when he was struck by a southbound Amtrak train traveling more than 70 mph. A large portion of his body was thrown about 100 feet on to the southbound platform, where it struck Gayane Zokhrabov, then 58, who was waiting to catch the 8:17 a.m. train to work. She was knocked to the ground, her leg and wrist broken and her shoulder injured.

Douglas Farah was in El Salvador when the San Jose Mercury News broke a major story in the summer of 1996: The Nicaraguan Contras, a confederation of paramilitary rebels sponsored by the CIA, had been funding some of their operations by exporting cocaine to the United States. One of their best customers was a man nicknamed “Freeway Rick” — Ricky Donnell Ross, then a Southern California dealer who was running an operation the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the Wal-Mart of crack dealing.”

The New Year is upon us, and you might be partaking in the tradition of making a resolution for the coming year. This year, why not make a resolution to protect your data privacy with one of the most powerful tools available? Commit to full disk encryption on each of your computers. Many of us now have private information on our computers: personal records, business data, e-mails, web history, or information we have about our friends, family, or colleagues. Encryption is a great way to ensure that your data will remain safe when you travel or if your laptop is lost or stolen. Best of all, it’s free. So don’t put off taking security steps that can help protect your private data. Join EFF in resolving to encrypt your disks 2012. Here’s some basic info about full disk encryption. You can read this and much more (including information on password security) in our recent whitepaper on protecting privacy at the border.

For Sam Eshaghoff, getting a high score on the SAT college admissions exam was more than a point of pride. It was a lucrative business. As Alison Stewart reports, other students paid Eshaghoff up to $2,500 each to take their tests using easily manufactured fake IDs. His scam came crashing down in fall 2011, when he was arrested for criminal impersonation and fraud. Eshaghoff has since accepted a plea deal, but the case still raises major questions about the integrity of the test itself.

Gang Bang Teacher: Cops Say She Had Sex With Five Students & Filmed It. Science Teacher Accused of Sex With 17-Year-Old Student. Caught in the Act: Cops Say Teacher Seen Having Sex With Student. Biology Teacher Accused of Sexy Lesson. Bad Teacher: Police Say Substitute Urinated in Front of Class. Cops: Teacher Caught Doing It With ‘Love Doll’ on School Property.

Russia’s deputy prime minister vowed Thursday to punish “sleepy” security officials after bloggers posted dozens of photos of an apparently unguarded strategic military rocket motor factory near Moscow. Blogger Lana Sator said she and friends met not a soul, much less any security guards, as they roamed around state rocket-maker Energomash’s plant, snapping pictures, on five separate night-time excursions in recent months. She posted almost 100 pictures of decrepit-looking hardware from inside a rusted engine-fuel testing tower, the plant’s control room and even its roof at lana-sator.livejournal.com

A recent survey conducted by a UK based divorce website disclosed that 33 per cent behaviour divorce petitions filed cite Facebook as a cause for filling for divorce in 2011. In 2009 this figure was 20 per cent. 5000 people were surveyed by Divorce-Online, the UK divorce website, during 2009 and 2011 covering Facebook as a means to check behaviour of spouse with the opposite sex and spouses using the social networking platform to comment about their exes post the separation.

► Faking It: How the Media Manipulates the World into War

As the drums of war begin to beat once again in Iran, Syria, the South China Sea, and other potential hotspots and flashpoints around the globe, concerned citizens are asking how a world so sick of bloodshed and a population so tired of conflict could be led to this spot once again. To understand this seeming paradox, we must first understand the centuries-long history of how media has been used to whip the nation into wartime frenzy, dehumanize the supposed enemies, and even to manipulate the public into believing in causes for war that, decades later, were admitted to be completely fictitious.

What was truly comical was the manner in which numerous U.S. military pundits magnified the actual threat the primitive Iranian navy poses. Contrary to those gross exaggerations, the fact is that the most serious threat in Iran’s maritime arsenal is its three small, aging, Soviet-era Kilo-class submarines. It is believed that at best, only two of the vessels are even still seaworthy, and the shallow, narrow Strait of Hormuz would preclude the effective use of any submarines. As for its surface fleet, Iran does possess a few fast missile patrol boats and an additional ad hoc flotilla of designated suicide attack boats. The majority of these craft are little more than rigid-hulled inflatables mounted with a variety of light machine-guns, packed with explosives and crewed by militia zealots. Opposing this cockleshell Flintstones navy is the mighty U.S. Fifth Fleet. Consisting of more than 20 warships, including aircraft carriers and missile cruisers

“Each box contains a set of bricks, that can be used to build the element of a concentration camp as shown on the box. All elements in the sets as well as those depicted on the boxes have either been taken from the mass-produced sets of LEGO bricks, or have been slightly altered by the artist. The prisoners are played by smiling skeletons from the “Pirate” set, while slightly modified figurines from the “Police Station” set appear as tormenters. In the upper-left corner of each box we find the following statement: “This work by Zbigniew Libera has been sponsored by Lego” – as the project was made possible thanks to the bricks presented by the polish department of the Danish company. Upon its presentation in Denmark, LEGO headquarters has launched legal complaints against the artist, however as a result of a fierce press campaign it has decided to drop the lawsuit. The controversies concerning Libera’s LEGO also appeared in Poland, yet those where of a somewhat different character.

This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color. How great is this? Given the opportunity my son could probably cover the entire piano alone in about fifteen minutes. The installation, entitled The Obliteration Room, is part of Kusama’s Look Now, See Forever exhibition that runs through March 12.

“It sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake” could be the theme song for a new spy satellite being developed by DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s latest proof-of-concept project is called the Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE), and would provide real-time images and video of any place on Earth at any time — a capability that, so far, only exists in the realm of movies and science fiction. The details of this huge eye-in-the-sky look like something right out of science fiction, as well, and it would be interesting to determine if it could have applications for astronomy as well.

“Skateboard” (as it is known in Brazil) is a sport that has emerged in the late 50 invented by surfers as a hobby in times of low tide. With the passage of time was the sportive will gain new fans and winning characteristics. In the mean time (years 50 and 60) there were a few musical recordings exploring the theme of skateboarding, such as “Skatebordin ‘Pt 1 & Pt 2” dual “Jan & Dean.” But the boom of skateboarding was only to give even in the late ’70s, when the sport received a veritable flood of newcomers, and soon to greatly increase the number of songs exploring this new market of skaters. The recordings ranging from power pop, bubble gum, glam, disco, funk or any musical style that could match the atmosphere that the young skate ever breathed, with a strong influence of surf music, especially the Beach Boys.